


From your memory to this instant; Or, Forensics

by gloss



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: 16+, Gotham, M/M, birdboys, queercore, relatively plotty, robinosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-10
Updated: 2009-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:01:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick stops fronting and trusts Tim. Maybe that's backwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From your memory to this instant; Or, Forensics

**Author's Note:**

> **Originally posted 08-23-07**
> 
> **Setting and spoilers:** This story takes place a couple years, give or take, after Infinite Crisis. While it's not necessary to have followed OYL canon to understand this, here's what's what. The fic follows canon through **52** and early OYL arcs in ROBIN, CATWOMAN, NIGHTWING, OUTSIDERS and JLA before it diverges. COUNTDOWN and the OYL stories in the main Bat-books (DetC &amp; BATMAN) are not taken into account, nor is FLASH:FMA 13.
> 
> In other words, Tim was adopted by Bruce; Selina Kyle did have a baby girl and Holly Robinson is Catwoman; and Dick is living in New York and working at a ritzy Chelsea gym. Bruce's Taliaspawn doesn't exist and Bart runs on.
> 
> These two scans are crucial:  (from ROBIN 155) and [](http://www.exitseraphim.net/glossings/images/comics/Dick-phone%20Checkmate13-p13.jpg) (from CHECKMATE 13; click to embiggen).

"Yoo-hoo, sweet cheeks!" Mrs. Ruiz, the gym secretary, calls from the office as Dick comes out of the locker room. "Got something for you."

Dick checks his watch. His last lesson ran overtime, and he's supposed to meet Kory for lunch in ten minutes. "Hey, Yolanda." Leaning in the doorway, he blinks the shower water from his eyes. "Thanks again for the fudge. Got any more?"

She clucks her tongue. "And put another ounce on your gorgeous frame? I'd fire myself, honey."

"Padding's good," he says and pats his belly. "Not half so good as that blue on you."

When she smiles, her gold incisor glints. "Flirt."

He raises his hands. "I'm up against the best, what do you want from me?"

"Hmm," she says and tilts her head. "If you only knew..."

In his back pocket, his cell buzzes the overture to _West Side Story_. "Sorry, let me --" He checks the number and turns a little for privacy. "Kory, sorry, I'm running late, I'm just about out of here, swear --"

"Did the small children enjoy flying?" Behind her, he can hear the noise of Village traffic.

"It's not really flying," he tells her. "They're just working up to the trapeze."

"I should teach a lesson," she says.

"You should, definitely." Dick checks over his shoulder; Yolanda is tapping her long, very red fingernails fairly ominously on the desk. "Look, give me half an hour? And I'll be there. Cross my heart."

"I plan on holding you to that."

Kory always did make threats sound like wishes.

Dick shoves the phone back into his pocket and gives Yolanda an apologetic smile. "Sorry about that. My lunch date's getting anxious."

"Girlfriend?"

"Ex. Sort of." He rubs his neck. "Sometimes."

One pencilled-in brow goes way up as she cocks her head. "And *that's* a story you're going to have to tell me."

"Soon," he says. "You said you had something for me?"

She hands him a large manila envelope. "All yours."

"Not another Valentine?" He rips open the flap. "Your husband's going to get suspicious."

"Mi esposo tiene que comer sus coños," she says, then touches her crucifix. "Where *were* you twenty years ago?"

The envelope's flap catches on the metal fastener. Dick might be a whiz on the flying trapeze and in hand-to-hand street fighting, but this thing's ready to defeat him.

"Figuring out the deep mysteries of tying my own shoelaces and telling time, I think." The envelope's contents -- a lot of paper, heavy -- shift in his grip as he rips open the flap. "Damn it."

"Damn it," she echoes as he yanks the bundle of paper from the envelope. "If only..."

He holds a bundle of photographs. Not paper, but 8x10 black and white glossies, clipped together with a legal fastener. A note's stuck on top.

Dick can only take in stray details. Dumbstruck, like he's just left a movie matinee and forgotten it's still daylight out, he blinks hard and fumbles toward understanding. As the photos move, the details slide past him, farther from sense with each moment. Details -- arms, and an embracing male couple, kisses to stubbled cheeks and tongues on naked torsos, a coiled tattoo on a hairy wrist, the dark patch of hair spreading out and thickening below a man's navel.

Tim's navel.

That's Tim in a kiss, his arm around someone's narrow shoulders, his back arching as a lozenge of shadow nestles at his waistband.

Photographs of Tim, achingly clear, pristinely focused. Naked, or nearly so, kissing another guy, grabbing at him, *kneeling* in front of him.

Dick's pulse beats across his face.

The note skates across the bundle. Whatever will Daddy say **pay**?

Mrs. Ruiz is saying something. Dick blinks hard; he tries to stuff the pictures back in the envelope, but the bundle swings open like a fan. His hands are clumsy, his vision swimming.

"...an actor?" she says. "I thought so much better of you."

"Sorry, what?" He shoves the bundle into his inside jacket pocket.

"Those're your headshots, right?" Covering her face with her hands, she sighs dramatically. "Another actor. Just what New York needs."

"Yeah," Dick says and sighs. "That's right. Sorry."

*

He does what he's always done when trouble arrives: he heads for home. He calls Kory from an exit off the Jersey Turnpike, explaining that Tim's got some trouble he needs help with, before hightailing it farther south to Gotham.

Dick hasn't been back for a couple months. It's been longer than that since he's heard from Bruce. After Sivana outed the Outsiders, Bruce's displeasure lowered like a concrete slab. His silence is geological; it always has been. Composed of various layers -- disapproval and disappointment predominate, of course, when it comes to Dick -- that silence has undergone pressure and erosion, seismic shifts and sudden slippage. It moves, Dick knows, but it's always there, like bedrock. He ignores it at his own peril.

This is what they do, how they've operated since, at least, Dick left for college. Longer, if he's feeling both honest and morose. He isn't so silly, not any longer, to think of the two of them as magnets, alternately repelling and drawing each other. There *does* seem to be a rhythm to their shifts between closeness and estrangement.

After everything that happened, after Blüdhaven and Kon's death, after that family holiday that stretched out for months, Dick should have expected that another period of silent distance was coming due.

But this concerns Tim. Dick is willing to take whatever uncast glances and clenched jaws Bruce has to offer. Some things surpass the current climate of Bruce's moods and judgments. Family, Tim, has to be one of those.

Family is the only trump card, actually, the only one that matters. Tim's in some kind of trouble. The note that came with the pictures threatened blackmail.

He hasn't seen Tim in a while -- not as long as he's been waiting to hear from Bruce -- but some things never change. Tim's like weather, or Alfred's scones, that way.

The slight edge he has given to his confidence by defining family as his trump card dulls, then snaps, when Alfred informs him that Bruce is out of the country.

In its place, a truer sense of relief flowers.

"He may, in fact, be off-planet," Alfred says as he assembles a roast-beef sandwich for Dick. "I cannot be certain."

Dick eats his sandwich under Alfred's watchful eye. "It's okay. I really just need to use the lab. And --" With Alfred just within reach, Dick cannot help but tell the whole truth. "-- talk to Tim."

Nearly the whole truth, that is; he doesn't want to worry Alfred, so he won't mention the photographs weighing down his jacket unless he absolutely must.

"Ah, well," Alfred says, wiping down the counter, removing all the crumbs Dick has left. "Therein lies another rub."

Dick clutches at his napkin. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Timothy has..." Alfred is never at a loss for words, so his pause must mean something. Dick leans forward, straining for the second time this morning for sense. "...seen fit to establish his own domicile."

"Where is he? What's wrong?"

Alfred smiles. "Do calm yourself. He is, to all reports as well as my own observations, hale and healthy. He has simply removed himself from this household."

"He quit?" No, Dick would have heard -- wouldn't he? -- if Tim had quit again.

"As far as I know, he continues his nocturnal adventuring." Alfred rinses Dick's plate and slides it into the dishwasher. "He has simply chosen to live in the city for the time being."

"What happened?" Dick relaxes his shoulders and stretches out his hands. He grips the edge of the counter and rocks his stool back onto two legs. "What did Bruce do now?"

That question earns him a sharp glance over Alfred's shoulder. Sometimes it seems as if only Alfred is allowed to criticize Bruce. Dick has never quite been able to accept that.

"Words were...exchanged," Alfred says tightly. He's been drying his hands on that towel for too long now. "Perhaps you would have known that, had you..."

Dick's shoulders sag and he has to force himself to meet Alfred's eye. "You're mad at me, too, aren't you?"

"I have no idea what you mean."

"The Outsiders," Dick mutters. "And --"

After he hangs up the towel, Alfred smoothes it several times. "All I meant was that asking me to 'catch you up', as it were, is a far less efficient method of communication than, for example, speaking with those after whom you are inquiring."

"I know," Dick says, almost under his breath. "I know."

Alfred pats his shoulder. "Then you're halfway to your goal already, aren't you?"

*

Just being in the Cave makes Dick feel better. The familiar shadows and faint electric hum inspire hard work, striving for excellence, all those qualities that a good detective requires. He spares a single, guilty thought of relief for the fact that Bruce isn't here; there's no one but Dick to lecture himself about having mishandled the evidence so badly back there in Yolanda's office.

He didn't know then that these pictures *were* evidence. That's no excuse, however.

He's still having some trouble thinking of them as evidence. Tim's presence in the photos complicates everything. He looks, so far as Dick can tell, pretty happy. There's no hint of coercion in what he's doing.

And he's doing -- Dick swigs down half a bottle of water -- a lot. Quite a bit.

Everything spread out on the table before him *is* evidence. The sooner Dick can think of the images, and everything else, simply as any other evidence, the better off he'll be.

He runs fingerprint tests first, then scans each photograph. He saves all his work on a flash drive and erases everything he can from the Cave's mainframe. As with Alfred, if Dick doesn't have to mention this to Bruce, so much the better. He knows, of course, that he can never perfectly hide from Bruce. Not only would he never want to, not really, he cannot see himself trying to. There are cameras everywhere, programs set to record every keystroke and click of the mouse.

There's always something to be said for subtlety.

The fingerprints all over the pictures and envelope belong to him and Yolanda. There isn't even a partial that can't be matched to either one; he uses every correspondence algorithm at his disposable, without any luck.

The note, too, is clean of prints. It's a scrap of standard office 20-lb bond, available at every single office-supply store in the greater Tri-State area. He measures the angle of its edge and runs the infrared camera to pick up any indentations. It's clean, as if it had been razored off.

There ought to be more prints. The smeared postmark looks authentic, but chromatographic analysis reveals that its red ink has never been used by any Western postal system. It is, in fact, a compound of ammonium carbonate, the shells of some bug called the cochineal, and ionized water. Someone went to a hell of a lot of trouble to fake all of this. When Dick checks the recorded CCTV footage around the gym, nothing unusual stands out. The blackmailer, or his courier, must have posed as a gym patron to deliver the package.

The routine of all this calms Dick.

He's done this kind of thing a thousand times, both down here and then at the academy. Not so much since then -- his duties in Blüdhaven tended more toward the chase-and-beat-'em side of things, less so the careful deliberation of real detective work.

Having used all the technology available, Dick settles into Bruce's big chair and studies the note with his own eyes. The words are written in a looping script in blue ballpoint pen. Chemical analysis has told him what he already knew -- the pen is a Paper-Mate/Write Bros. medium point. Those sell, ten for two bucks, on every corner of the city.

Something about the note bothers him. He can't put his finger on it -- the archness of its tone, maybe, or the obscurity, rethought and crossed out, of its threat.

Whatever will Daddy say **pay**? 

"Whatever indeed," Dick says aloud. Frustration drags at his bones and strikes inside his temples.

He strips down to his underwear, tapes up his wrists, and takes a swing on the rings. Working through his old routine, the one that Bruce devised when Dick hit his second growth spurt, warms his muscles and clears his head. He has done these moves for so long that he doesn't need to think, just stretch and balance and *hold*.

As he shudders through the last ten seconds of an Iron Cross, toes pointed down to the ground, he decides he needs to take a new tack. He knows all the evidence by now -- the note scrawls across the back of his eyelids and each photograph glows at the edges when he calls it to mind -- so he needs to think more abstractly.

He sucks in a breath, holds it, and rolls backward into a somersault tuck. Off the rings, spinning three times downward, and he lands steady and confident, facing away from the evidence table.

The triple-somersault dismount is his own addition to the routine. Bruce always called it superfluous; Dick calls it fun.

Six of one, a half-dozen...

He is on the treadmill, eyes closed, imagining that he is mounting the steps to Nanda Parbat. Each step is the face of a Rogue. As he moves, he eliminates them as suspects one by one.

The package came to Dick Grayson, so whoever's doing the blackmail knows both him and Tim as civilians, as well as their connection to Bruce and Bruce's wealth. That eliminates most of Gotham's villains -- Cobblepot, Joker, even Harvey, hate only the Bat and his birds. Harvey, however, remains on the larger list of suspects, because the note's rephrasing could, if Dick squints, walks on his hands, and tilts his head, be read as a symbol of two.

That leaves, of the rogues, a fairly unsettling list: Ra's and Talia, Cain, Deathstroke, and Selina. Blackmail doesn't strike him as a tactic for *any* of them. The note's reference to fatherhood might suggest Slade's involvement, but he is far more likely to kidnap and kill, take center stage, than do anything both non-violent and behind-the-scenes.

Aside from them, there is only the population of the world with access to the Wall Street Journal and Fortune. Tim's adoption made the financial sections and the cover of Fortune, after all, for reasons that Dick still can't understand. He was named as the other surviving adoptee.

He has reached the top of the steps and he's jogging in place now. He can't get Selina off the list, but he doesn't know why. There's no reason for her to do this; the last Dick heard, and he'll check this, she was doing her own thing in the East End, keeping her nose relatively clean.

When he does check the files, he's surprised to learn that she's uptown these days. With a *baby*, of all things. Bruce's terse note on the baby's file reads, paternity in doubt: Wayne, Bruce is not considered a probable candidate (0.017% chance). Father most likely Samuel J. Bradley [see Bradley, "Slam"] (98.73% chance). Dick taps the monitor and reads it again. There are unwritten volumes in that note, entire histories of missed opportunities and not a little disappointment.

He drags himself back on-topic. A new mother might be in need of quick cash and, moreover, unwilling to hit the jewelry district. Anything's possible.

A glance, however, at Selina's bank accounts -- and those are just the ones that Bruce knows about -- assures Dick that her cashflow is more than adequate. It's healthier than his own, in fact. Dick turns from the monitor, sliding from the chair and kicking up into a handstand. He's still thinking about Selina -- a *baby*? -- and he can feel a connection to the blackmail. *Feel*, but that's about as helpful as reading the note again. Pointless.

The note sounds like something she'd say. It's the "daddy"; he can *see* her mouth twisting into a smirk as she says it. It's a catty thing to say, a bitchy way to phrase it. Catty and campy --.

"Oh, no, no, no --" He scissors his legs and lands on his feet, running back to the evidence.

The note came from Jason. It had to.

Red Hood came back from the dead campier than a thousand Chelsea boys. There's no note about *that* being an effect of the Lazarus Pit -- but Dick can't remember the kid ever sounding like that before.

It's the simplest explanation. He never spent all that much time with Jason before -- *before*, but Red Hood's a whole new beast. Dick is sure of that.

*

Dick wins tonight's recitation of the longstanding argument about whether or not to stand on ceremony. So he and Alfred eat dinner together in Alfred's quarters. Not for the first time (not nearly), Dick wishes that Bruce could learn to set aside differences as neatly as Alfred does. Whatever Alfred's opinions of Dick's "rambunctious team" and their operations, he can share a meal, make small talk, remind Dick that he is at home.

When Dick helps himself to thirds of the steak-and-kidney pie, Alfred daubs his lips and smiles.

"Your appetite remains as dauntless as ever," he says.

Dick's hair falls in his eyes. "It's your cooking, that's all."

Alfred's touch, to the back of Dick's left hand, is dry and nearly weightless -- a leaf, or a passing breeze. "How are you getting on?"

"Ray's Famous has nothing on you," Dick admits. Alfred shudders at the mere mention of pizza. "If you're offering care packages, I wouldn't, you know --"

"Noted," Alfred says. "I'll add you to the list."

"I'm kind of hurt I'm not already at the top." Dick grins and Alfred raises an eyebrow. "Did you know Cat--. Selina had a baby?"

"Helena Louise, yes. She's a lovely little girl." Alfred tilts his head. "So far as infants can be deemed 'lovely', of course."

"Of course," Dick echoes. He isn't surprised that Alfred knows all; he keeps tabs on everyone, just like Bruce. It's only that Alfred's way is far more kindly. "And Jay? Is he on that list of yours?"

Alfred sits back; his posture never wavers from perfect, but he folds his hands in his lap and glances away. "If he were, that would please me very much."

That could mean just about anything. Dick tosses the hair out of his eyes -- he never looks down so much around anyone else, save for Bruce -- and taps his fork against his empty plate. "Jason's...pretty different. These days."

"Ah," Alfred says. He places his napkin beside his plate and moves his knife and fork to three o'clock. "That is not for me to say."

And that's that. He won't get anything else out of Alfred; whether that's because of MI5 training, years on the stage, or simply the discretion of an excellent manservant, it doesn't matter.

Dick clears their plates and insists on washing up. It's growing dark outside; he leaves Alfred revisiting a volume of Trollope and jogs down the stairs, back to the Cave.

Catching Jason's signal on the computer's tracers should be easy enough. Probably as frequently as Bruce plants the tracers, Jason removes them, but no one besides Bruce could find them all.

Now Dick just has to figure out which signal belongs to Jason. He types in "R", but only Robin's signal flickers up over a satellite map of the city. Tim remains still, probably working surveillance, over in New Town across from the Botanical Gardens, close to where the Latvian mob has established a beachhead. Dick next types in "Red Hood", but gets no hits; he tries "Jason" and "Todd", even "RII" and "R2", without success. Exhaling like a blowfish, he bounces a little to shake off the frustration, then cries uncle and calls up the full list of signals.

On the list, just above Jim Gordon's entry, "GS" blinks back at Dick.

Bruce named Jason's signal Good Soldier. Dick can only shake his head; what matters is that he knows where to find Jason. The rest...isn't any of his business.

*

Dick goes in civvies. The point is to talk to Jason, not fight with him. Not fight too much, that is, and there's no point in provocation if he can help it. Jason has taken some kind of atavistic dislike to Dick's costume. Noir et bleu, he sneered the last time they met up, Ooh la la, Monsieur 'Aile. They're probably going to fight, but Dick can still try to minimize those chances.

He *does* wear a kevlar undershirt and armored briefs. That's just good thinking.

On the far edge of the Bowery, just across the highway from Robbinsville, he picks up Jason's tracer. Meandering southwest, it zigzags, block by block, pausing among a row of warehouses.

Dick follows it, keeping two streets between them, then jogs down two blocks. Half a block from one of Jason's reported boltholes, he crouches on the first landing of a fire escape. He doesn't have to wait long.

Jason, wearing the full-face red mask, is practically skipping down the alley, a shopping bag from Vision Video in one hand, his knife in the other.

Dick flips over the edge of the fire escape, his left foot hooked into the slats, and grabs Jason around the neck.

"Oh, hot stuff," Jason says breathily as Dick tugs until his toes scrape the ground. "Where you been all my life?"

Dick tightens his hold. "Shut up."

Jason dangles from his grip, head bent back, and he's still manages to be obnoxious. "You shut up, pretty boy."

"I want to talk to you," Dick says. He gives Jason a shake, and the shopping bag falls to the ground.

"Thought you wanted me to shut up." Jason raises his knife, then points down to the bag. Fresh blood is smeared along the hilt. "Those DVDs better not be broken, or you're paying my security deposit."

Only Jason could knife someone, then rent some videos. Dick shakes him one more time. "I'm going to let you down. Then we're going to talk. You're going to behave yourself."

"Yippee-skippy," Jason mutters and lands in a crouch when Dick drops him. "Etiquette lessons from the big brother. Did I miss this?" When he stands up, he cocks his hip and rests his fingertips on the mask's chin-area. "Is *that* why I let you catch me?"

"You did not."

"I so did."

Dick swings off the fire escape and jostles Jason's shoulder. "You squeaked like a little --"

Laughing, Jason shoves Dick back. "Wait, no. I didn't miss this." He slaps the mask's cheek and shakes his head slowly. "Nope, not a bit."

Dick flexes both hands and watches Jason move a little closer.

"Nothing to miss, after all," Jason says softly. "All those good memories, baseball games and touch-football, getting taken under big bro's wing? Never happened, did they?"

Dick swallows against the automatic apology.

Jason moves within arm's length, then closer. His head tilted, he's giving a very good impression of studying Dick.

Finally, shaking his head again, Jason steps back. "And to what do I owe the distinct *un*pleasure of this little social call?"

"Working a case."

The red mask works exactly the way Jason probably wants it to, obscuring any human expression, highlighting only the most exaggerated ones. Jason claps his cheek and gasps. "Need a wisecracking junior sidekick, huh? Bringing little old *me* up from the minors, giving me another chance at the big leagues? Why, I declare --"

Dick punches him and savors the momentary silence. "Inside."

Jason grabs his bag of videos, tucking it under his arm, glancing at Dick over his shoulder. "Inside where? I've never been here before."

Dick raises his fist. "Inside, jackass."

"Crashing my treehouse?" Jason pushes past Dick, striding down the alley. "Didn't you read the sign? It's the 'No Dicks club'."

After Jason fumbles with a key-ring worthy of several janitors, unlocking and muttering and popping the door open, he steps aside with a flourish. Dick's shoulders tense, but he takes the invitation at face value and enters first.

Jason flips on the light switch and tosses the bag on a high counter. "Mi casa es su casa."

It smells like the dorm rooms at Hudson, sweat socks, musk, and *guy*; it's a lot bigger than the dorm rooms, but it looks like one, too, decorated with rock posters and pictures of motorcycles. On the far wall, behind a plasma television, an arsenal hangs, jumbled and crookedly, everything from pearl-handled pistols to a modified rocket launcher. Turning, Dick bangs against a bank of surveillance monitors on the kitchen counter. Where most people would have a microwave and a toaster, Jason watches the city. Once a bat, he can hear Barbara chuckling, always so.

In the entry way, Jason does his best to loom, fists on his hips, mask wrinkled up in a grotesque parody of a smile.

Dick squeezes his eyes shut briefly. He's here for Tim. He can do this. When he opens his eyes, he says, "Could you take that stupid mask off?"

Jason tilts his head. The mask has gone featureless now, smooth as a child's balloon. "You don't like it? I'm hurt."

"It's better than my mask," Dick says. "On you, I mean."

"Anything's better than you."

"Right." Dick tries to take a deep breath without letting on what he's doing. "It's -- you look like --" A popsicle, a lollipop. Dick grins, getting back in the game, remembering the groove. "Makes you look like a clitoris, man."

Jason's shoulders move. He zips up his bomber jacket all the way, hunching down into the flipped-up collar so it reaches his ears. "Better now? Who'm I?"

He lifts and drops his shoulders, dragging the collar up and down the red dome. The wet, obscene noises he makes get muffled by the jacket, but they're still obvious.

"The Glorious Glans?" Dick asks. He might be *in* the game, but all the same, it's a stupid one. "Ultimate Uncut?"

"The Giant Dick!" Jason crows, laughing hard. He stops short. "Wait, no, that's *you*. Damn it, foiled again. Whenever will I learn?"

Dick leans against the counter, one arm crossed over his chest. "Are you finished?"

Jason spins on his heel and kicks at the air. "Done that."

"Can we just --" Dick rolls his shoulders. He can hear how stupid he's going to sound, but indulging Jason's mania gets boring, and quickly. "Can we just *talk*?"

Jason waves his hand, waggling his fingers. "Haven't gagged you, have I?" He glances over his shoulder, the mask furrowing at the brow. "Not yet. I aim to please, Dickie. You just say the word."

"Take the mask off."

"Do I get a prize?"

Dick measures his breathing. "What do you want?"

"Lemme ponder that." Jason reaches around to the nape of his neck and unlatches the mask. "Cogitate. Consider. I'll let you know."

"You do that," Dick says.

Tossing the mask away, broken open like a watermelon split down the middle, Jason flips forward and lands on the futon couch in front of the TV. His flip was messy; he's favoring his right arm, the one Dick pulled over his head. His hair is damp with sweat, dark and curling over his forehead, as he undoes one boot and kicks it off.

He glances up. "You got somewhere better to be? Sit."

The futon is crap, barely more than a blanket folded over plywood. Dick hopes Jason doesn't actually *sleep* on this thing, but he can't say anything about that. Not unless he wants an earful about how *some* kids get goosedown beds in mansions. But he can hope.

"Pretty bitching lair, huh?" Jason shifts, spreading his legs, drumming his fingers on his knees.

"Yeah, okay," Dick says and looks around politely. "It's -- cozy."

"Dickie, Dickie, Dickie-*Bird*," Jason says, shifting again, leaning over to undo his other boot. "You suck at small talk. What can I do for you?"

Usually, Dick excels at small talk. He *likes* to talk. But here he can't seem to think of anything to say that won't set Jason off, or tug at his own guilt, or both.

"I wanted --" Dick starts, then shakes his head. "It's about Robin."

"Oh, I gave *that* up a while ago." Jason pats Dick's knee and sighs deeply. "Just wasn't working out for me, you know?"

In his mind's eye, Dick sees the Cave's files again, updated just after Jason's death. Robin II, deceased, 5'4", 146 lbs. He tightens his arms and manages to contain his shudder. "The -- current Robin."

Jason gasps, feigning shock, clapping his hand over his mouth. "There's another one? Lands a'living, I had *no* idea!"

"Other than beating him unconscious, right." Dick's jaw stiffens. This is better, reminding himself of *Tim*, his bloodless face and swollen-black eye.

"-- the very *idea*! That I could be *replaced*, I never --" Jason grins and elbows Dick's ribs. "Oh, right, the scrawny little pissant. We were just roughhousing, see. Brothers do that. Not that you'd know."

Dick lets that jab pass and waits. Given enough silence, Jason seems compelled to fill it up, chew it down and spit it back out. That, at least, hasn't changed.

"How *is* Timothy?" Jason asks, sooner than Dick had expected.

"You tell me."

Eyes darting -- though that, too, could be an act -- Jason rears back. "How would I know?"

"Because," Dick says firmly, "you're stalking him."

Jason stretches his arm along the back of the couch, grazing Dick's shoulder. He rests his cheek against his arm and smiles slowly. "I don't think so."

"You are." Doubt wiggles a little way into Dick's mind and he tries to ignore it. "You are."

"Nope," Jason says. "Pretty damn sure I'd remember something like that."

"Jay --"

"Look, I'm cuckoo for Crocky Crunch, no doubt, but why would I stalk some skinny impostor?"

Dick points at the dartboard, just to the left of the weapons on the far wall. The Fortune cover with Tim and Bruce is pinned to the board, Bruce's face blacked out with marker, Tim's decorated with red, pimples and exaggerated mouth. As much as he doesn't want to admit it, Dick can see the Joker's leer drawn over Tim's lips.

This time, he *does* shudder.

Jason shrugs. "Working off steam, whaddaya want?"

"You're stalking him," Dick says, keeping his tone as even as he can. "What's even worse, you're blackmailing him. Pictures, Jay."

Snorting, running one hand through his damp hair, Jason bounces a little and jiggles his knee. "You caught me, Dickie. I'm a dirty blackmailer, trailing that tightass little faker all around town, crouching in the Manor's finely-trimmed hedges, getting *all* his secrets on candid camera."

Dick knits his fingers together, then pulls them apart.

"Not sure what I'm going to do with the snapshots, though." Jason tosses his hair and rubs the back of his neck. "*That* kind of thing, blazing in full-blown Technicolor? It's *money*, is what it is. Entertaining several offers right now."

"What kind of secrets?" Dick asks. The pictures aren't in color, of course, but maybe there's a set he hasn't seen yet.

Jason bounces more quickly, rattling the futon's slats. "Master Timothy gets up to *so* much trouble, you really don't know. Girls every night, two or three at a time, coke by the kilo, snorted off strippers' asses. Shouldn't be surprised, you know what they say. Like father, like..."

The problem with Jason's lies -- besides the fact that they *are* lies -- is that they're too outrageous. He's much scarier, a lot more powerful, when what he's telling you is the truth.

The truth is, Dick sucked at acting anything like Jason's big brother. He met the kid a couple times, duly resented him, just as Bruce probably intended, and then promptly forgot him, distracted by Kory's love and Bruce's anger, then by Barbara's shooting.

The truth is, they all owe Jason a lot more than they've given him. He won't *take* anything kinder than a punch in the face, but that doesn't mean he's due a lot better than what he's received.

The truth is, someone else is blackmailing Tim.

Dick presses the tips of his index fingers against his eyes and draws a long, deep breath.

"Now what?" Jason pushes at Dick's shoulder.

Dick tugs a copy of the least incriminating photo from his pocket. They're all *incriminating*, but this is the least explicit. Tim and his friend are shirtless, but still have their pants on, and they're kissing. Just kissing.

He flicks the picture at Jason. "Ring a bell?"

Lower lip caught in his teeth, Jason studies the picture for a long time. Meanwhile, Dick studies Jason. His expression wavers between concentration and amusement. Finally, he rolls it up into a tube and shoots it back to Dick.

"Yeah," Dick says, answering his own question. "I didn't think so."

"Little Timmy all growed up," Jason says. "Blue-eyed rich boy found himself a nice piece of ass."

Dick unrolls the picture and smoothes it over his knee. The boys' postures are relaxed, intimate. Tim's eyes are closed, his hand on the other guy's neck, his hips tilting forward.

"But it's not me," Jason continues. "Macking on Tuh-Tuh-Tim? Why, that'd be nigh on *incest*, Mr. Grayson."

"I didn't say it was you," Dick says. He shouldn't have let Jason lull him, however briefly.

"So you're just going around, showing off his latest conquest? Doesn't sound like something he'd approve of."

"No, damn it, I --" Dick wrenches the picture back into a tube and stuffs it into his pocket.

"So when's the party?"

"What?"

"Master Timothy comes out!" Jason makes a frame with his hands and squints through it. "I can see it now, the grand ballroom at the Kane, decked out -- positively *dripping* with them -- in white and lavender orchids. Got to have the lavender. Tim's draped in a *dreamy* Vera Wang confection --"

"Jay. Shut up."

"You shut up. I'm having a *vision*. He'll be escorted by Brucie, of course, though it'd be *perfect* if it was by the Bat, tall and gloomy and just *glorious*, you know?" Jason slumps back, dropping his hands and sighing. "Too bad about the secret identity. Really ruins all the fun."

"Uh-huh," Dick says.

Jay holds his head in his hands, his voice muffled and sad. "All these secrets, they really get in the way."

"Right, well." Dick moves to stand up. "I should go."

"Nah, stay." One hand on Dick's knee, Jason leans over to the floor, digging through newspapers and take-out cartons for the remote control. "I got some good porn. Stay a spell."

"Jay --"

Jason isn't looking at him. His mouth is twisted, his jaw set, shoulders up around his ears. He looks exactly like a kid who never gets his way. A dog who's been kicked too many times.

The television blares to life, making Dick jump. Jason grabs Dick's arm and hauls him back down. On the screen, a kindly-looking older Japanese man is talking about the drainage of the Amazon River basin.

Dick pokes Jason's shoulder. "You think The Nature of Things is porn?"

Shrugging, undoing his fly, Jason says, "Multitasking. Doing a little self-education. Not all of us got the chance to flunk out of college."

"I didn't flunk," Dick says and feels the drag of the game, the sparring, hold him in place. "I left."

"Besides --" Jason spreads his legs and lifts his ass, working his pants down. "I always liked 'em older." He lifts his chin at poor David Suzuki, who's looking up in wonder at the forest canopy, then glances sidewise at Dick through the fall of his hair. "Don't you?"

Dick can't move. He knows he should get up, say something, but he instead he just sits there, watching TV, as if the wise Mr. Suzuki will relent soon and tell him what to do.

Jason spreads his legs, jostling Dick's knee, leaning a little against him.

He should say something.

"Doesn't mean shit," Jason mutters. His hand moves slow and hard on himself. White knuckles, thumb flicking the head like someone else would remove a bug from a picnic table. "Never happened, don't worry."

"Jay --" Dick says as Jason twists and scrabbles at Dick's fly, his breath coming hot on Dick's neck.

"C'mon, *Robin*." Jason's imitation of the Bat-voice is eerie, rough and just right. That makes sense; he's been watching and listening to them all long enough. Too long.

"Jay --"

"Robin," Jay says again and squeezes Dick hard enough to hurt.

Dick can't tell what the name's supposed to mean, whether Jason is correcting him or addressing him.

He can't, really, tell very much of anything, not under Jason's damp palm, curving around his cock, not with Jason's face buried in his shoulder.

"Yes," Dick says. Tells Jason as he lifts his hips to match Jason's hand. "Yes."

Jason tilts his head back a fraction. Eyes slitted, teeth's imprint in his lip. "I could suck you."

Dick laughs, the sound so harsh he has to bite it off. "No offense, buddy, but --" Jason twists his grip and Dick thrusts. "Your teeth aren't going anywhere near my dick."

Jason's face crumples into a pout, but Dick moves fast, wrestling him back and propping him against the back of the futon.

"Besides --" Dick pauses to lick Jason's neck, tasting Gotham and sweat there. Home. "You're doing pretty good right now." He rolls his hips, fucking Jason's hand until Jason almost-smiles. His lips twitch like he knows a secret. Dick pushes his hand under Jason's sweatshirt, spreading his fingers over the warm skin, sucking on the base of Jason's neck.

"Ah, fuck, *Dick* --" Jason shudders.

Dick tries to bend over, glancing up at Jason and licking his lips, but Jason stabs his elbow in Dick's chest.

"Let me," Dick says. "Want to."

He gets his hand under Jason's own, runs the shaft between two knuckles. Jason's eyes roll crazy for a moment. "Rubber."

"...what?"

Jason's sneer sharpens his whole face. The expression's effortful, though, as if his heart's not really in it. "Slap the glove on, *bro*."

There is yet another history, right there, an entire set of fat volumes that Dick doesn't, can't, understand. He lifts his hand off Jason's dick and scrabbles in his pocket for his wallet, certain there are a few Trojans in there.

Jason's head is flung back, throat exposed, and his hand returns to Dick, moves nice and slow, as Dick rolls down the condom and follows with his mouth. He's bent over, one foot on the floor, pushing against Jason's hand as he sucks. He tastes latex, but smells *Jason*, sweat and sweet soap, and soon all he tastes is his own spit and the heat radiating off Jason.

This much he can give him, fucking his mouth up and down until Jason caves in on himself as Dick thrusts against the futon. Jason's hand clutches at Dick's hair, his hips bump Dick's nose. The cry he gives when he comes is stuttered, broken and shocked.

Jason holds him there, pubes scratching Dick's cheek, and Dick has to worm his hand beneath himself, pull himself off the rest of the way. The orgasm shivers brightly, blanks out and delays any regret that's threatening.

*

The regret comes later, along with the realization that if Jason isn't the blackmailer, he's back to square one.

Dick pokes at his omelette the next morning; Alfred is moving around the kitchen, humming an old vaudeville tune under his breath.

"And how is Master Tim?" Alfred asks when he adds more potatoes to Dick's plate.

Startled, momentarily paranoid (What does he *know*?), Dick almost jumps. "What? Sorry --"

"You mentioned you needed to see Timothy," Alfred says.

"Oh, I --." Dick rubs his jaw and reminds himself to shave. He showered last night, after Jason, for much longer than usual. The manor's superior water pressure wasn't the only reason for that. "Couldn't find him."

Dick has always been halfway convinced that Alfred is telepathic. If he is, Alfred doesn't give any sign just now. He merely nods and murmurs, "Pity."

"Yeah," Dick says and stretches. Lest Alfred notice how out-of-it he is, he finishes the rest of his breakfast. He pads back upstairs to shower again and get ready to go back to the city.

He has classes to teach at the gym this afternoon. Truth be told, he's looking forward to them even more than usual. This way, he has a reason to get out of Gotham for a bit, do some thinking, reorient himself on the case.

None of that explains why he hasn't yet gotten in touch with Tim.

Mostly, he wants to save Tim as much trouble and worry as he can. After the last couple years the kid has had, the last thing he needs is more stress.

There's an underlying discomfort at work, too. How, exactly, is Dick supposed to raise the subject? This isn't about work, and Tim's always been cagey about his personal life. Usually Dick would just noogie him until he could drag the information out, but he can't imagine doing that with *these* details. Get Tim in a headlock and ask about his various naked activities? Dick's face gets hot just picturing that.

Hey, Timmy, about that fellatio -- probably won't work.

He also needs to work out what he's going to do about Jason. Dick doesn't know where to start with *that*, either.

All these secrets, Jason said last night, and the truth peeked out through the fog of all his obnoxious bullshit, they really get in the way. Sometimes Dick thinks that just waking up in the morning, greeting a new day, means that more secrets are created. Just moving through the world gathers secrets in your wake.

Dick shakes his fist at the Cave's ceiling. Just being down here inspires gloomy, philosophical thoughts.

He does a final check of all the equipment he used, wiping down the counters and knobs, then runs through the computer's logs. Protecting someone, like he's trying to do for Tim and his newest secret, is their family's working definition of love.

"It's called *trust*, sweetheart," Barbara said at one point during his recovery. He'd nodded and gone back to dragging his sorry ass across the mats.

But he's thinking about it all over again. Isn't that what got Stephanie killed? Not knowing the secret of Matches Malone. Not being *trusted* put her in danger.

He remembers, later during that year off, sitting on a roof in Bratislava with Tim. Talking about her, because that day would have been her birthday.

"I didn't...I don't think," Tim said and took a rattling breath. "I didn't love her enough. I thought I did. I was *sure* I did, but then --"

At the time, looking at Tim's hands, his palms empty but cupped, as if they were weighing the air, Dick thought that Tim was simply being too hard on himself.

He still thinks that, but for different reasons. Then, he regretted how deliberately Tim measured the success of his feelings -- according to the level of his effort, as if that could make some crucial difference. Effort, Dick thought then, had nothing to do with love.

Now, as he stacks his notes and copies of the pictures into a file folder, he thinks that he understands better. Feeling isn't enough. It's what you do *because* of feeling that counts. He has no doubt, for example, that Jason still loves Bruce, and even Dick himself, but Jason fights and yells, explodes and kidnaps and kills. Even if he does love them still, his actions destroy the truth of that feeling.

Dick knows that he loves Tim. He must. Not simply because he's Robin and because he's the little brother Dick never had, but *because* Dick is doing all this -- tracking down Jason, filing away evidence -- to help him.

Now if he could just think half as clearly as he's doing now when it comes to Bruce -- then, Dick's sure, he'd be sitting in clover.

*

Back in New York, Dick stays busy. Shoshanna Liebenkind has a gymnastics meet coming up, and he's tutoring her on the uneven bars. His afternoon Tots &amp; Tumbling class is as crazy as ever. Kids are shrieking and rolling every which way while their moms or nannies, and one handsome stepdad, sidle close to Dick, suggesting private lessons or steak dinners. Sometimes both. The trapeze class with the older kids proceeds much more smoothly, although Theo Kaplan still refuses to try a jump without Dick spotting him.

"You're gonna fall," Dick says, pulling back the trapeze with one hand while he holds Theo's shoulder with the other. He tries to make the advice sound like his dad always did, reassuring and challenging at the same time. "Thing is, you want to make it look *good*."

Theo's mouth twists and he slides away, padding to the edge of the mats. "Maybe next time."

It's hours later, with dusk already settling over the river and piers, when Dick gets free. He stops at his loft to pack a change of clothes and check his messages, fully intending to get back on the bike to go back to Gotham.

And then, in the middle of his apartment, not even having turned on the lights, Dick just stops. Suddenly, going back to Gotham seems as pointless as a mission to the moon. Nightwing can always find plenty to do here in New York. The thought of going back to the lab and poking at the photos for another night just depresses him.

When Dick decided to cut their year-long trip short and return to Gotham, Tim wanted to go with him. Dick remembers that morning as clearly as anything. He leaned in Tim's doorway, bag in hand, while Tim folded himself into the lotus position on the floor by his bed.

"You should stay," Dick said. "You and Bruce, you're doing...better, you know?"

Tim's eyes were already closed, but the lids tightened until his face was a mask. He nodded. "I told you before," he said, his voice flat as if he were chanting a mantra, "it's not about me."

It's not about me. It's about what **Robin** can do. I have to believe that. Tim had said *that* a little over a month into the trip. Dick was still doing P.T. and regaining his strength while Tim was training at his side for, Dick guessed, lack of anything better to do.

Dick welcomed the company.

There they were, lying on the mats, letting the sweat dry, while the ship's engines thrummed all around them. They were talking about -- no, talking *around* Superboy. Never mentioning him by name, not even public identity, but Tim drew the towel in his hands taut before snapping it against Dick's leg. "Death comes in threes," he'd said, and rolled onto his side.

Dick threw out his arm and touched the damp hair just over Tim's temple. "Maybe so," he had said.

He stands here now, in the middle of his empty apartment. Urban Minimalism shading to Ghostly Transience, the new Flash had said when Dick invited him to crash here after the fight on Titans island. You can afford furniture, right?

The dusk has turned to dark and Dick runs his fingers lightly up his jaw, over his temple.

He calls the number for Tim that Alfred tucked, not at all discreetly, into his pocket. When he gets shunted to voice-mail, the sound of his own voice echoes in the loft.

He can't help laughing at his crappy luck.

"Hey, buddy," he tells the voice-mail. "Just checking in. I've got some free time and you know what they say. Idle hands. Can we hang? Give me a call." He bends at the waist and wraps his free arm around the backs of his knees. "Miss you, Tim."

And *that*, Dick realizes, is his problem. Not the mess of this case -- he has felt far more lost many other times -- and not even the more-than-mess he's made with Jason.

He misses Tim, simple as that.

Somewhere, he's sure, Alfred is smiling. He's probably shaking his head, too, amused and saddened all at once at just how long it has taken Dick to work this out.

Now, he can move. He slides on the Nightwing suit and climbs out the window, flying before the grapple can even connect.

*

A day and a half later, Tim still hasn't returned his call. There are uncountable reasons for that, Dick knows, and lists as many as he can to himself several times.

He jogs up the steps of the 7th Avenue stop and around the corner into the heart of Park Slope. He's already late to meet Mr. JLA Bigshot Harper for lunch -- where Dick fully intends to give Speedy no *end* of grief about the League -- when his phone rings.

The number displayed resolves, thanks to one of Babs' hacks, to a pay phone in midtown Gotham. Dick answers right away. "Finally, man. Where were you, freaking *Bialya*?"

"It's beautiful this time of year," Jason says.

"Oh, hey, I thought --" Dick stops short and gets rammed in the Achilles heel by a lesbian pushing a tricked-out stroller. "How are you?"

Jason snorts. "Can it, Dickie."

"I'm sorry, I should've --" Dick bows and scrapes to the angry mom *and* Jason, waving his free hand and ducking his head. "I'm sorry."

"Shut the fuck up, hot lips. I got you a lead."

Dick twists around a lamppost. "A lead to what?"

"Your case, dipshit." Jason speaks slowly and distinctly. "Remember? The one where baby brother got jiggy with the wrong fag?"

"Jay, this line isn't --"

"Did I say anything? Jesus."

Dick tucks his chin against his clavicle and sighs. "What's the lead?"

Jason makes him wait. Long enough that Dick balances on the toes of his left foot for the space of two light-changes on 7th Avenue. "Meet me at Newell and Duffy tonight. If you manage not to piss me off, I'll share."

Dick repeats the address back, then adds, "You know, we should really --"

"If you say we should 'talk'," Jason says tightly, adding a mocking whine to 'talk', "your head's rolling home all on its lonesome."

"But --"

"Head. Roll. See you."

Outside the restaurant, Roy's waiting, arms crossed over his chest, shit-eating grin on his face. He checks his watch and shakes his head when he catches Dick's eye. Lian throws herself off the gate she'd been climbing and rockets toward Dick.

The shadows of leaves spangle and shift over her face as she runs.

"Hey, big girl!" He sweeps her up in his arms and she shouts. Kissing her cheek, he says, "Who's that funny-looking guy? New babysitter?"

*

As soon as Dick lands on the top of the old Mercantile Exchange building overlooking the intersection of Newell and Duffy, he's glad he came in costume.

He's deep in the heart of the East End, so he shouldn't be surprised by the sight that greets him: Catwoman's got the whip snagged around Red Hood's ankle. One tug, and Jason belly-flops down on the tarpaper of the roof. She stands over him, hands on her hips, foot on his throat -- that's not going to make much of a difference, though. Jay's taken to wearing more armor than the 'mobile. He's only staying down, Dick suspects, to humor her.

"We're on the same side," Jason says. "C'mon, kitty, don't you remember *me*?"

She's not Selina, Dick can tell from one glance -- she's smaller, she moves more jaggedly, much more like someone trained extensively by Ted Grant than someone with Selina's natural grace. -- but Jason either doesn't know that or doesn't care.

"Answer the question," she says.

Dick steps out from behind the struts of the water tower and holds up his hands. "He was meeting me."

"Was not," Jason says and flips forward onto his feet, sending Catwoman stumbling back. "Bluebird over there's a lying liar of lies."

She's holding her ground nicely. She never takes her eyes off Jason, but points at Dick. "What's the score, Nightwing?"

"He -- Red Hood, he set up a meeting here."

"In *my* territory," she says. She's got Selina's hauteur down pat.

"C'mon," Jason says again. When he smiles, the red mask crinkles strangely. Creepily. "You and me, kitty? Same side."

She crosses her arms. "I don't think so."

"Red --" Dick starts to say.

He stops when Jason draws his gloved index finger across his throat, then jabs it in Catwoman's direction. "Really? Black Mask go boom? Remember?"

"Not --" She squares her narrow shoulders and takes a step forward. When she speaks again, her voice is much firmer. "Not important. What I want to know is, what're a terrorist and Boy Scout Numero Uno doing in my neighborhood?"

"Terrorist?" Jason claps both hands over his heart. "You wound me!"

"I don't know," Dick tells her and smiles apologetically. "Honestly, I just --. I don't know."

She doesn't soften; something in those goggles just *intensifies* her glare, actually. "So what *do* you know, big guy?"

Dick can think fast. He's not as fast as Bruce and Tim, but fast enough, and he knows how to perform. "I'm working a blackmail case. Red Hood said he might have a lead for me. That's as much as I know."

"Uh-huh." She spins the whip's handle in her hands, then flicks it at Jason's feet. "And? What's the lead?"

As much as Dick wants to sling his arm around her shoulders and chime in, "Yeah, what *is* the lead?", he refrains. The peace on this roof is momentary at best, and very fragile; the next move is Jason's, which isn't the most comforting thought. So he waits.

"Tattoo on the blond's hand," Jason mutters, looking away from them, across the street. "Thought it might be something."

"Does that help?" she asks Dick.

He shrugs. "I guess. I'd like a little more."

"Fine! Fuck me for *nothing*!" Jason spins on his heel, arms outspread, and shouts at the sky. "It's not a tattoo, it's a club stamp, and I found the club --" Dropping his voice, he stalks up to Catwoman. Dick thinks he sees her flinch, but he isn't sure. "Right here in *your* precious neighborhood, pussycat. Happy? Can I go now, Mommy? Dad?"

"Which club?" she asks, levelly, keeping her eyes on Jason and hand on Dick's elbow.

"Baker's Dozen," Jason mutters. "Couple blocks over."

"But that's a queer --" Catwoman stops and bites her lower lip. She glances at Dick. "You know it?"

"Nope."

"Okay, okay." She rakes her hand over her cowl, betraying nerves that Selina would never feel, let alone admit. "Let me call my contact, maybe we can get you in."

She turns her back as she dials something on her cell -- it's the same make, Dick notes, as his own, which means that Bruce is sharing his toys again. Good. -- and Jason shoulder-jostles him.

"Hey, sweetie," Catwoman says into the phone as he gets Jason in a headlock. Dick flips him onto his back.

"What's with all the cloak and dagger?" Dick kneels on Jason's chest, holding one arm over his head. "You couldn't just *e-mail* me the info?"

Jason wiggles perfunctorily. "Funner this way."

"Great," Dick says and lets him go. "That's -- just great."

"Okay!" Catwoman calls. "You free in a couple hours?"

"Any time, slinky," Jason says in the worst sleazoid accent since Matches Malone retired. "You just meow."

She flicks her hand at him and addresses Dick. "Meant you."

"Sure...?" He relaxes his stance. "What's up?"

"My contact --" She purses her lips and tips up her chin when Dick grins at the word 'contact'. "She'll meet you there."

*

Dick returns to the Manor to get ready for the club. He hasn't been to a gay bar since he partnered with Gannon, but he doesn't think so much has changed that he won't fit in. In his room's closet, he finds the sort of clothing that Alfred would *prefer* Dick wear -- expensive wool pants, button-down shirts in linen and silk, nothing that Dick would ordinarily put on, but good ingredients for a club visit.

He hasn't been *out*, whether the bar was gay or not, for nearly as long as it's been since he heard from Gannon.

Dick snags a white shirt from Tim's room and tucks it into his gray pants. He remembers, very clearly, that in these kinds of places, the tighter the better. He undoes the shirt's top three buttons and checks himself in Tim's mirror.

Tim's room is empty -- Dick suspects, however, it wasn't all that decorated when Tim *lived* here. Still, his reflection in the large oval mirror is almost ghostly, eyebrows and white shirt, shadows all around him.

He can't picture Tim in one of those clubs, crashing with music, strafed by strobes, packed with bodies in motion. On the other hand, he hasn't been able to picture Tim doing very much of anything, yet he has the evidence in hand. The evidence says otherwise.

On a whim, he raids the Cave's disguise kits and combs some silver highlights through his hair before slicking it back.

If the clothes make the man, as Alfred is fond of murmuring whenever confronted by Dick's preferred sweatshirts and jeans, then the costume fabricates the persona. Dick doesn't look like himself, but he feels like a clubgoer, tarted-up and ready to party.

Not half-bad, if he does say so himself.

He's looking forward to dancing, at least. He hasn't gotten to move the way he likes, thoughtless and fast, for far too long. He doesn't have much of a plan for the night, merely an expectation that he'll dance and meet people, ask about the club's regulars. Somehow, he'll come home with leads on Tim's blackmailing boyfriend.

In his wallet, Dick has been carrying a picture of Tim that he took during their time away. Tim was waiting for him on the steps of the Victoria and Albert Museum, waiting so they could go to lunch together. Dick had the camera at his eye already when he called Tim's name; otherwise, he never would have captured the look of surprise and pleasure that flashed over Tim's face. That expression - wide eyes, cheeks scalloped by the shadows of leaves, curving mouth -- quickly passed into irritation, but Dick has the proof, right here, that it *did* happen.

He makes good time back into Gotham, parks the bike in a WayneTech lot, then rides the bus down to the East End. He's never been quite as comfortable here as in other parts of the city -- the East End's streets are an overlapping mess of dead-end alleys and mews that get more traffic than the avenues -- but this is still home, still familiar territory.

He waits outside the coffee-shop-slash-deli, tapping his foot to the music in his head, wondering idly just what Catwoman's contact is like. Contact, 'sweetie', it sounds like Holly still has a ways to go in terms of maintaining the usual boundaries that this lifestyle calls for. "Lifestyle" makes him think about Holly -- her past with Selina, just how it is that an acknowledged lesbian would sleep with men for money -- when a wolf-whistle snaps him back to attention.

"Please tell me you're not, um," a tall girl with spiky hair and purple glasses says, moving her hand, "the guy with wings?"

"Sorry, yes, I am." Dick shakes her hand. "Rob. Rob Malone."

She's got a good grip, and an even stronger smirk. "Right, sure. Look, I don't do the whole *secrets* thing very well, so --"

"Funny," Dick says, "I was just thinking about that."

She frowns slightly, looking him over. "So just call me Karon, okay?"

"Karon, got it." Dick isn't sure what to make of her -- she doesn't seem all that dressed up. He's pretty sure she isn't wearing any make-up, but maybe that pea coat of hers is covering her dancing clothes. "So, you and Holly, huh?"

"Me and Holly, yeah." She cuts a glance toward him and maybe Dick isn't supposed to let on that he knows Holly's real name. But Bruce has called Selina by name *countless* times over the years. "She said you could use a hand at this club?"

"I'm a dancing *fool*." He spreads his arms. "Do I look like I need any help?"

Karon bites her lip. "Honestly? Yeah."

Before Dick can reply -- before Dick can start thinking of *what* to say to that -- the streetlamp above them creaks. A figure drops to the sidewalk, landing in a crouch. A surge of irritation, gritty and hot as lava, shoots up Dick's chest when he recognizes Jason.

"Don't change a *hair* on that beautiful head!" Jason jumps to his feet. "I think he looks --"

Dick moves in front of Karon. "What're you --"

Jason cocks his head. He's not wearing either of his masks, and there's a scent of Old Spice on the air. "Clubbing with you guys. What's it look like?" He peers over Dick's shoulder. "Hi, you're Karon. I'm Jay. I'd shake your hand, but jackass here is in the way."

As he steps aside, Dick tries not to run his hands through his hair. He'll just end up with glitter on his hands.

Don't fidget: He thinks he's telling himself, but the voice belongs to Bruce, lips chapped, waiting through another long, cold night of surveillance. Stop. Stay still.

Jason isn't using a fake name, and he's got his arm through Karon's, and Dick has the feeling, at once sudden and familiar, that the ground is sliding out from under his feet. And whaddaya do *then*, sonny boy? That's his father. You fly.

"What's wrong with me?" Dick asks. He means to ask Karon, but Jason erupts into laughter. Dick twists away, trying to block Jason with his shoulder. "I thought...club. Dancing. You know, the usual?"

"This place --" She shakes her head and reaches over to ruck up Dick's hair. "This scene's not all that *sparkly*, you know?"

Her hand, its nails short and blunt, comes away with silver speckling her fingers and palms. Karon wipes it on her jeans and considers Dick for a long moment. "You got a jacket? A sweatshirt, maybe?"

Leaning against the grate over a store window, Jason shrugs extravagantly. "You look good enough to eat. Just my opinion, but --"

Karon tugs on Jason's sleeve. "Give him your sweatshirt."

Folding his arms and hunching in on himself, Jason pulls away. "Hell, no."

"Do I look *that* bad?" Dick asks.

Karon rubs her neck. "You look really nice. If you're going to a circuit party or opening a tapas restaurant in South Beach." She smiles, apologetically, yet Dick feels as if he's the one who should be apologizing. Before he can, she unbuttons her peacoat and shrugs it off, handing it to Jason to hold, before pulling off the old, dark-brown cardigan she's wearing. She tosses it at Dick. "This ought to work."

"Kinda tight, though --" Dick says as he pulls it over his head.

Jason guffaws. "Like that's ever stopped you."

Dick snorts, glancing up before telling Jason to shut up, but he catches Karon covering her mouth and laughing. She shrugs. "He's got a point."

"You two are mean," Dick says. He frowns at them, mostly kidding, but there's a small patch, deep in his chest, that hurts. "Really mean."

The club is around the corner, in an old commercial building set uneasily at the end of a residential street. On the way, Dick manages to line up stories with Jason -- they're looking for a missing kid who fits Tim's description -- but not without a smirk and a leer from Jay. "Wanna save little fag's sweet ass, huh?"

Dick strikes a nerve on Jason's neck and temporarily paralyzes his right arm. "Watch it."

At the club, the wide display windows are papered over with generations of handbills and posters. Dick thinks at first that the club proper must be on another floor, but -- like with just about everything else tonight -- he's wrong.

Holding his arm across his chest, Jason jostles him aside, sweeping through the amber-bead curtain and striding inside. Karon slips her arm through Dick's and says, "Not quite what you were expecting?"

"No," Dick says. "Not really."

This isn't a *club*, not in any understanding he has of the term. It's more like one of the dorm lounges at Hudson. Old, mismatched furniture is scattered around the high-ceilinged space, the springs creaking under scrawny, androgynous bodies. Everyone looks roughly alike, lean and serious-eyed, dressed in drab colors; even the dye in their hair is dulled, nearly washed out. Boys and girls don't seem all that different, not in their unisex uniforms of drab. The music plays low, a plaintive guitar and swishing drums. A song to nod off to, not dance to.

"Fucking emo kids," Jason says when Dick catches up with him at the bar across the room. "Would it kill 'em to smile?"

There are vegan brownies and carrot cake for sale along with two beers on draught and some dusty liquor bottles. Like the furniture, the bottles look as if they'd been liberated from an assortment of 1970s' rec rooms.

Despite his snickering assessment, Jason moves easily among the kids. He blends in, too, with his drab clothes and lank hair. Dick cannot remember a time or situation when Jay fit in better than *he* did. But he does, sidling through the narrow spaces between the sofas, bumming a cigarette, lighting someone else's with a Zippo.

Cigarette tucked behind his ear, he bumps Dick's hip when he returns to the bar, then orders a Zesti and winks at Dick, offering a toast.

Dick's hands are empty, but he nods anyway.

"Phil, my man --" Jay nods at the skinny Puerto Rican -- maybe Dominican -- kid trailing behind him. Phil has a shaved head and inch-wide rings dilating his earlobes and he smiles shyly at Dick. "Knew him back at Ma Gunn's."

"Hey," Phil says. His hand clings warmly to Dick's for longer than usual. He lets go when Jason kisses the crown of his head and shakes him by the neck like a puppy.

Across the room, Karon is also making the rounds. She knows, it seems, more than half the kids here, and Dick wonders if Holly knows them, too. He loosens his shoulders and clears his mind, trying to take this all in, suspending judgment and premature assumptions. He's already made a bad series of assumptions, starting with suspecting Jay, going all the way to his wardrobe choices. That's all right; all he can do now is regret the mistake and do better this time.

"Deader than dead around here," Jason says, his Zesti drained to the ice cubes.

"Early yet," Phil replies. He sounds apologetic. "Doesn't get going til late."

Jason laughs. "Me and Robbie, we're used to late nights."

Phil's eyes widen. "You together?"

"No," Dick says. At the same time, more loudly, Jason says, "On and off. Can't seem to shake each other."

The truth is probably somewhere in between both their replies.

"Oh," Phil says, his gaze lingering on Dick, just as warm and close as his hand had been. Then he rolls his neck until it pops and punches Jason's shoulder. "Where you *been*, bro?"

Jason crunches the ice between his teeth. "Here and there. Found a nice old daddy for a bit --" He slips his arms around Dick's waist when Dick winces, then slaps Dick's ass. "-- didn't work out. Bummed around, you know."

"Know how that is," Phil says, his mouth turned downward and eyes a little unfocused.

"Thought you might." Jason knocks Phil's shoulder with his own.

"Excuse me," Dick says. He plays it cool, moseying away, like he didn't even hear.

Behind him, Jason's voice carries loud and clear. "Rob's a square," he says, "but he's so damn pretty, we usually forgive him."

The longer Dick is here, the stranger this club feels. There are several old, walnut-cased television sets playing music videos, episodes of the A-Team, and surreally-pastel 1980s gay porn. No one seems to be paying them much attention. Couples, and two trios, are making out on various couches, but most of the crowd seems content to mill around in ever-shifting groups. The walls, like the windows, are crowded with posters -- for bands and one-act plays and anti-gentrification protests, environmentalist sit-ins and anti-war demonstrations. As if politics were just another performance.

Or, Dick catches himself, as if music and theater were as political as anything else.

He tries to imagine Tim here. It isn't -- quite -- as difficult as he might have expected. Set aside the tang of marijuana on the air and the pornography unreeling on the screens, and this is a fairly serious place. Tim would like that.

Dick hopes, however, that Tim hasn't taken to not washing his hair and dressing in urban drab. The kid is even preppier than Bruce; Dick might tease him mercilessly about the golf shirts and Bermuda shorts, but that's his prerogative. That's what big brothers *do*.

Say Tim wandered in here one night and got caught up in the scene. That much is credible. Say, further, that somehow one of the gay political groups got their hands on him. Tim is sharp, and whip-smart -- Bruce- and Barbara-level smart -- but Dick doubts that he has much political sophistication. It's entirely possible that Tim could be taken in by one of those groups that does "outing" and the like.

If Tim were gay, that is --.

But Dick's seen the pictures. Whatever was going on there, it wasn't coerced.

That doesn't mean those activities shouldn't have remained private. Sex is *private*, it's not supposed to be for sale, for blackmail, for --.

Dick scowls at the wall.

A mosaic of posters for something called "Queer Corps" scowls back at him, a tiled array of an angry face, mouth open, yelling silently. At first, he'd taken the name for a band, but the small print on the nearest poster draws his attention: Get up, get mad, get MOVING and If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

In the hole of the screaming mouth, a spiral has been drawn, rotating like a piece of Op-Art. It is the same spiral that, in the form of a tattoo, decorated the sharp pelvic bone of Tim's companion.

The closest Dick has come to political criminals, aside from Redhorn's corrupt municipal reign, is idiotic villains like Anarky and KGBeast. NKVDemon and his ilk. If he's going to investigate gay radical groups like this one, he'll need help.

He ducks out of the club. A short way down the alley, he passes an entwined couple grinding their crotches together. Their piercings rattle as they move. Farther down, he dials Oracle's private line and crouches against the wall.

After seven rings, she finally picks up. "Really busy right now. What's up?"

"Hello to you, too," Dick says and stretches out his bad leg. When she sighs, he adds quickly, "Do you have anything on a group calling itself 'Queer Corps'?"

There's a pause, which could mean she's accessing her databases, but Dick doesn't hear the familiar rat-a-tat-tat of her fingers on the keyboard. That could be the reception, though. Finally, Barbara says, "Talk to Tim."

Relief breaks out through Dick. "He's investigating them? Good."

That makes *sense*. That's the first thing that's made sense since he opened the damn envelope. Not only does it make sense, it's familiar.

He'd still like to know why Tim used his real name..

Barbara's teeth click together. Dick can see, clear as day, her jaw getting that familiar stubborn set. "Just...talk to Tim, okay?"

Dick's grin gets wider. "Yeah, yeah, I will --"

She cuts him off. "Hon, I have to go."

Back inside, it takes him several moments to find Jason. He and Phil are sharing a single armchair, Phil draped over Jay's lap, their faces mashed together. If it's possible, Dick feels even more relieved at the sight. Jason's big hand cups the back of Phil's skull, his fingers brushing the shaven stubble.

Dick only realizes he's staring when Karon shakes him by the arm. "It's not a floor show," she says.

Dick can't reply, only shrug.

"Anyway," she continues, handing him back the snapshot of Tim. "Couple people say he's been around, but they haven't seen him for a couple weeks."

"Was he with Queer Corps?" Dick tucks the picture back into his jacket.

Karon frowns a little. "How'd you know that?"

"Well..." Dick taps his nose. "I *am* a detective."

"Uh-huh," she says. "Anyway, I gave 'em your number, and a couple other people who met your lost boy. I don't think they've got much more to share, but --" She tosses her head so her glasses slide back up her nose. "-- what do I know, right?"

"You've been really helpful," Dick tells her. He wants to clasp her hands, or her shoulders, really let his gratitude sink in. But Karon's got a personal-space vibe nearly as strong as Bruce's. He settles for ducking his head and adding, "I don't know how to thank you."

She grins quickly, almost shyly, and squints into the middle distance over Dick's shoulder. "Tell the big guy to go a little easier on Holly, and we'll call it even."

"Is he --"

"Never mind." Karon steps away and pushes her hand through her hair so the spikes go back up. "Look, I'm going to hang out for awhile. Think you can find your way back uptown?"

That is, Dick thinks, the classic brush-off. If he didn't feel quite welcome before, this is a vault door slamming shut in his face, the lock spinning. "I'll be fine," he says. He starts to unbutton her sweater.

"Take off your kit!" Jason calls. Phil laughs uproariously and a couple people clap.

Karon touches the back of his hand and guides it down. "Keep it. Pretty nippy out there."

Dick has waited for the bus, traveled six stops, and transferred to the express before he figures out how to reply to that. "Not as chilly as it is in here." He says it under his breath, watching his patchy reflection in the window, and feels a little better.

In his room in the Manor, he peels off his clothes and checks the pockets. The snapshot from London flutters to the floor. When Dick picks it up, silver glitter is smeared across Tim's face.

He looks like a stranger.

*

Barbara said to talk to Tim; Dick intends to do just that.

Soon, anyway. First, he finds any number of things to do instead. He helps Alfred in the garden all morning, tying up the rose bushes and weeding the beds, amiably agreeing to Alfred's complaints about the landscapers. In the afternoon, he actually picks up the phone twice, but ends up staring at its screen without dialing.

Tim never returned Dick's message. That's just not like him. He might drop out of touch, retreat into his tiny turtle-shell, but he always returns calls. He was raised *right*, after all; his manners are impeccable.

Dick's hesitation is due to more than just a slip in etiquette. Every time he thinks about Tim, he sees the pictures first. The *evidence*. While that's par for the course during any investigation, the reduction -- no, the *replacement* -- of Tim by those slick, impersonal photos leaves Dick more than slightly queasy. It isn't right, thinking of anyone, especially someone he loves, as a victim, a collection of clues.

Dick would like to believe -- he needs to believe -- that he doesn't compartmentalize like Bruce does. His inability to keep personae and other people separate is both a hindrance and a blessing. Sometimes he wishes he could make those distinctions. Detective work and analysis might be a lot easier if he did. Living might be easier. After all, how much of Blockbuster's torture had to do with just this, Dick's inability to separate himself from other people?

Most of the time, though, he's glad that he can't slot people and things into separate boxes.

He cannot think, for instance, of Clark as anyone other than *Clark*, who is also Superman, who might otherwise have been Kal-El. The names are conveniences that aid the mission; they don't speak of separate essences, not to Dick. Bruce, on the other hand, has three separate directories in the computer for information about the man, the hero, and the alien.

Dick believes that he is always himself, whether he's lifting a toddler up onto the trapeze or kicking a drug dealer in the nuts. Whether he's got the mask on or not, he's the same person. The masks, like names and secrets, are necessary -- of course they're necessary. But they aren't *true*. They're useful, not the truth, no matter how Bruce treats them.

But. And yet. Tim is his brother, his buddy, his *friend*. Yet when Dick thinks of him now, he sees black and white images of naked boys with groping hands and straining bodies, and the high-summer flaring color of that snapshot, not Tim.

He knows Tim, maybe as well as anyone now that his friends are dead. And he knows Robin better even, he suspects, than Batman does. At least as deeply.

Seeing those pictures, investigating this case, keeps reminding him again and again just how much he doesn't know. How much he has yet to understand. That these lessons came in the form of Tim's nakedness -- his bared skin, contorted face -- is almost ironic. Definitely upsetting.

Compartments aren't about the costumes or their absence. All those different names and their accompanying outfits -- those are just facets of the same person underneath. He has always believed that.

But now he's *seen* Tim, seen the person underneath, seen all that skin, and nothing makes sense any more. It's as if the naked body overwhelms every convenient boundary, exceeding them and rendering them useless. Something jagged and heavy drops in his gut whenever he thinks of the pictures. Of Tim, naked.

Dick shakes his head to clear it, then bends over backward and kicks his legs up into the air. He's missing something here, forgetting something important.

After all, he's seen Roy every which way, in all sorts of situations, guises, and outfits. As Speedy before he grew into his big hands and bigger feet, as Roy, skeletal and hollow-eyed, as Speedy again once he'd recovered and filled out, muscles straining at the yellow tunic, as Arsenal, as Lian's daddy, as Red freaking Arrow. As *himself*, lip in his teeth, freckles glowing with sweat, hips pushing against Dick's.

Same with Kory -- one of the things he's always loved most about her is that she *can't* hide, refuses to try, even when she was modeling -- and Barbara, too. Helena.

He's made love to all of them. In all that time, he's never felt this vertiginous drop in his gut and his mind at their nakedness.

Then again, if he's honest, there was Jason. Maybe Dick *did* feel this back there on Jay's futon, this gut-tumble that makes him flail for a handhold.

Maybe he did. It's still nothing like thinking about Tim.

*

He hates getting tangled up in thought like this. He isn't, after all, Tim, let alone Bruce. Before night hits, Dick is jogging up the stairs of Tim's brownstone, an old, shabby-genteel rowhouse on a street lined with its identical siblings. He's got two pizzas under his arm and relief flooding through him.

He's moving. He's *doing* something. Everything's going to be all right.

Tim lives on the fourth floor, three long flights of creaky stairs; Dick takes them two, sometimes three, at a time. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he raps on the door. He can't wait on politeness, so he bangs his palm flat against the wood.

Tim opens the door, then walks backward, leaving room for Dick to come in. He's wearing old corduroys, pale with wear at the knees, and an unbuttoned Oxford, with Bruce's monogram on the pocket and patches on the elbows, open over a concert t-shirt.

Dick remembers, sudden as glass breaking, being shocked by how rich people wear old clothes. His mother never would have believed it.

Tim's barefoot. He doesn't look all that happy.

He looks no different than a thousand other times. Dick still can't shake the sense that he's somehow become a stranger. Everything's different now -- if not *everything*, then at least something key, something significant.

I saw you na-a-ked, the kid in the back of Dick's mind crows. He sounds a hell of a lot like Jason.

It's not that. It's not simply the nakedness, but the fact that Tim is evidence.

This must be how Bruce always views the world.

That thought breaks Dick's stasis. He barrels into Tim, wrapping his arm around Tim's narrow waist and tossing him over his shoulder. The pizzas tilt inside their cartons; Dick drops them on a rickety antique table and spins Tim around.

"No hug? I bring pizza and love and I don't even get a hug?"

Tim kicks up his left leg and flips down. Neat as a cat, this one. "I've got company."

"You sure do, little man!" Leading with his hip, Dick knocks him hard and slings his arm around Tim's shoulders to mess up his hair.

"Real company, I mean," Tim says.

Dick doesn't get a chance to pretend outrage. Just then, Tim's company, a pretty girl named Zoanne, pokes her head around the hall corner. "We were just finishing up."

"Plans for world domination? Pillow fight? What're you crazy kids getting up to?" Dick settles on a comfortable old couch, pizza on his lap.

Study date, apparently. Zoanne turns down Dick's invitation to stay for a slice or three, so he eats while they finish a calculus problem set, then gather up their books.

He's good at playing the big brother -- loud and obnoxious, bent on noogeying Tim and forcing him to loosen up. What's more, he really enjoys it.

Dick's halfway sure -- which is a lot less than he was just a week ago -- that he isn't faking these feelings. It's an act, but everything is; that doesn't mean that it's false.

His head's starting to hurt again.

Tim's acting weird. His eyes are restless, but the rest of his body seems even stiller, *tighter*, than usual. When they're alone, after several attempts at getting the conversation going have stalled out, Dick brandishes a pizza-crust at him and kicks his ankle. "You're weird."

From the small loveseat, Tim gives him a small smile. "I've never heard that before."

Dick kicks him in the shin. "Different weird."

That smile comes again, barely more than the corners deepening.

Anything could be wrong, a thousand and one different things could be bothering Tim. Dick knows that, but he can't shake the sense that he's got something to do with Tim's crappy mood. The blackmail is still candidate number one, rocketing to the top of the charts, but there's no way Tim can know about that, or Dick's involvement. Unfortunately, that leaves Dick with several other possible causes.

But when Tim lifts his hand to push the hair out of his eyes -- his hair has grown longer than Dick remembers, slightly shaggier -- the gesture pushes everything else out of the way.

The morning that Dick left their round-the-world trip to return to Gotham, Tim sat on the floor of their hotel bedroom, legs folded like a lotus. Dick was trying to say goodbye, but stopped when Tim raised his hand just like that. He was batting a mosquito away, not touching his hair.

Just the same.

"I shouldn't have made you stay," Dick says now. When Tim raises his eyebrow, Dick makes himself not look away. "Back there. I should've asked you --. To come back with me."

"There wasn't any making." Tim drums two fingers against his knee. "I'm not your sidekick."

"You're not anyone's sidekick." Dick means -- did mean -- that as a joke, but as soon as he hears himself, he hears the truth of that. Tim made Robin into his own thing; how long has that been true? At this point, Robin's more independent than Batman or Nightwing. Even Red Hood.

Dick rubs his face, side to side and top to bottom. When he's done, Tim is regarding him, head tilted slightly, his fingertips hovering over his knee, mid-tattoo.

"What I mean is," Dick says, "was --. I mean. You should've come back with me. I don't know why I didn't ask. Or let you."

"Well," Tim says, and his fingers move again, much more slowly. "I do lack Batwoman's obvious...charms."

Dick shrugs. "Don't know about that. I mean, she's got some inches on you, but everyone does, even Cobblepot."

Tim scowls and for the moment that the expression lasts, he actually looks like a teenager. Like the age he's supposed to be. It's easy as anything for Dick to reach over and cuff his ear, ruck up his hair. Tim ducks and scowls again; as Tim's face smoothes out, Dick adds, "Anyway, from what I hear, you and her are *sisters* under the rainbow, right?"

Tim's expression hardens until Dick's grinning like a *moron* at little more than a mask. He'd like very much to throw himself out of the window right now. Maybe cut his tongue out first, just so he never cracks another stupid joke ever again.

He's on his feet, arms swinging, moving around the room before he can see Tim's face crumple. "Jesus, Timmy, I didn't mean --." He rakes both hands through his hair, pulls hard enough to tug some free, wishes for the old ponytail to really yank on. "Can I take that back? Can I *please* take that back?"

He's back in front of Tim now, teetering, looking everywhere but at him. Now his legs are buckling as he drops into a crouch and he's grabbing for Tim's hands. They try to slide away; Dick tugs them back. Tim *lets* him.

"I --" Tim bites his lip and his eyes are steady. "I'm not ashamed."

"Right, right, that's good --" Dick's head bobs and the words just keep coming, as if he can fill up the silence, make all this better. "You shouldn't be, of course, there's nothing to be ashamed of --"

"Dick." Tim turns his wrists inside Dick's grasp until his palms open to the ceiling. "This isn't an afterschool special."

"No, no, sure it's not, of course it's not, it's just --" The goddamn pictures are pouring past Dick's mind's eye, a whole torrent of them, mixed-up and distracting. Animated jerkily like experimental puppets, the most explicit images in the blackmail envelope, Jason's vision of Tim's coming out on the arm of the Bat, everything, dances and whirls like a surreal porno montage.

"You're smiling," Tim says. His fingers curl over Dick's thumbs half a second before the urge to move strikes him again. Like Tim knew the restlessness was coming.

Dick grins all the way. Tim probably *did* know. "Do you have a boyfriend? I'm going to need to meet him, you know. Big brother's prerogative."

All he knows about a possible boyfriend is the lanky blond guy with a tattoo on his hip and his hands in Tim's hair, his nipple under Tim's mouth. The prospect of meeting the guy he has already seen naked can't be any weirder than the idea of hanging out with Tim had been -- but this is going okay. Dick's stupid mouth aside, anyway.

"Droit de seigneur, of course." Tim's smile fails to reach his eyes. "No boyfriend, sorry. Not any more."

"Oh," Dick says, deflating a little.

"It's okay," Tim says. He's reassuring Dick, which is all kinds of backwards. "I tried, you know? Maybe not as hard as I could, but I did. Try."

"Sure you did." Dick squeezes Tim's hands as his thoughts slow and stutter. He'd like to know what constitutes "trying". That's an old question, though; Dick's always fallen into relationships. He hears his dad calling from the center ring: You're gonna fall, Richard. Just make sure it looks good. When he glances back at Tim, Tim's looking away, and his lashes are almost wet. "It's probably his fault, anyway. Want me to pound him?"

Tim gives him that same small, effortful smile.

"Also my prerogative." Dick nods, as if it's that obvious.

"Of course," Tim says. He's humoring Dick now, which isn't much better than reassuring him.

"I'm serious," Dick says, and wonders if that's true. "Just say the word, and the guy's toast. A stain on the pavement."

Tim shifts against the worn upholstery. "I can --. I know how to handle myself."

Christ, Dick's just stepping in it every time he opens his stupid mouth. Conversations with Bruce are supposed to be the minefields, not the ones with Tim. He wants to roll back into a somersault, go up on his hands, do *something*.

Tim, however, looks like he's waiting. Dick just wishes he knew for what.

"Yeah, I know you can," Dick says. "I'm just --. I'm trying, okay?"

There's that word again. Trying. He can hear Alfred, earlier today, complaining about the landscaping crew -- they are quite trying, sir, if I do say so. He can see Tim before him, *trying* to stay calm. On anyone else, the expression would count as blank, the posture appear still. But on Tim, the jump of the vein in his throat, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the eyes lowered (his lashes are really long), it all adds up to effort. Trying.

"Hey," Dick says, keeping his voice low, like they're in a museum, like he's afraid to disturb the dust. "Hey, what'd I say now?"

Tim snorts. "Nothing. Don't worry about it."

"You can tell *me*," Dick says. The false bravado grates against his throat, leaves his mouth sour, and it sounds fucking *awful*.

"It's not about you," Tim says flatly.

Flat, just like that. Maybe Tim wasn't waiting for Dick. Maybe -- definitely -- his silence, all the effort and avoidance, have nothing to do with Dick. His reading of things has been too selfish; he thinks he's here helping Tim, but he's just getting in the way. Since he just went through a break-up, the last thing he probably wants to deal with is Dick around, bugging him and being a jackass.

If he leaves now, though, that counts as abandoning the kid. He's not about to do that.

"Okay, it's not me." Dick rolls his shoulders to loosen up; his hands are getting sweaty, caught in Tim's, and he can't restrain the urge to bounce, slowly, on his heels. "Not me, that's good."

It *is* good. Dick is all but guaranteed to make a spectacular mess of anything he's involved with, anyone he cares about. So if it's not him, and Tim wouldn't lie, not about that, then it's -- easier. Better.

He doesn't exactly believe that, but he's getting closer.

"You're a good big brother," Tim says, then hesitates.

"But?" Dick closes his eyes and hopes there isn't a 'but' coming.

Tim works his left hand loose and strokes Dick's forehead with his thumb. "But sometimes..." The touch is soft as anything, despite his calluses, just the movement of air over Dick's skin. "A lot of the time, actually. I wish you weren't."

"I'll do better," Dick says. "I promise, I haven't been --"

"I --" Tim curls his free hand into a fist; Dick doesn't remember opening his eyes, but he must have when Tim stopped touching him. "Dick. That's not what I meant."

There is a light on in the hall, but nothing in this front room. They stare at each other through the shadows.

Dick has crouched here for so long that his bad knee is starting to ache. Vaguely, just twinges for now, but he knows he should move. At least massage it, but his hand stays where it is, curved over Tim's thigh, as he blinks against the shifting, dim colors.

"Have you ever needed to *be* someone else?" Tim's voice is as dim as the rest of the room, quiet, more like he's talking to himself than to Dick. Yet he's looking right at Dick, his eyes catching the light from the hall. With his eyes lit, his face in shadow, he looks like a photo negative of Robin in the mask. "Needed, wanted it so badly you'd claw off your own skin if you could?"

"You know I have." Dick's mouth tastes like metal; he realizes he's gritting his teeth only because his tongue feels lost. "You were there."

At first, the Cave was no more Dick's than the suit was Tim's. They both tried their damnedest to be who they were supposed to be. Maybe they succeeded; maybe they helped each other.

They're both still and quiet. Dick has learned -- not thoroughly, but here and there, patchily over the years -- how to let the other person talk.

Roy, a month out of rehab, his eyes still a dead man's: Shut *up*, fairy boots. For one goddamn second, would you?; or Babs, the first time he saw her after she was shot: Swear to God, I'll get up and gag you right now, see if I don't.; or Kory, one night on the roof of the apartment she shared with Donna: Just breathe, Robin. It will not kill you. That is, he can't stay still or quiet for *long*, but he's getting a little better.

"When I tracked you down," Tim says, so softly it might be another memory, another exhale, "I didn't want -- what happened."

Dick's chest tightens. The stink of the circus, the little kid staring at him with saucer-wide eyes, the fights that never ended with Bruce, only paused before resuming more furiously -- all of it comes back.

"I *didn't*," Tim adds, insists, so Dick nods. "I just wanted to put everything back, fix it. Put it back the way it was supposed to be."

Eight months after he was moved into the manor, Dick broke a Wedgwood plate. His hands shook, glue spattering all over the table and into his hair, when he tried to glue it back together. He was convinced he'd get kicked out for this, sent back to Children's Services or just left downtown at the bus stop. When the plate was almost dry, he set it back in the display cabinet in the west parlor and swore on his mother's name that he'd never to go into that room again. Never make another mistake.

The next day, when he came home from school, Alfred served him his snack on that plate. Age and use confer character, he'd said while he poured Dick a glass of milk. You'll understand that some day. In the meantime, eat up.

"I wish I had," Tim continues. "Sometimes, all the time, I wish I'd fixed things. It would be..."

Dick nods again. "Your parents, sure."

Tim's eyes wheel on him, sudden and startling, blue as that old plate. "No."

His voice is a thunderclap; Dick winces. "I thought --"

"No," Tim says, just as loudly. "If I'd succeeded, if I hadn't *failed*, then I --. I could, we could --"

"Oh," Dick says and, finally, understands.

Tim leans in, blue eyes and red, bitten lips. Dick forgets about grief, and history, the shrimpy little brat who knew all their secrets, forgets and *gets* it.

Tim wants him. "Yes," Dick says and keeps nodding. "Yeah, okay."

"But I'm --" Tim shakes his head and starts to pull away. "I'm not --"

He's fading, like old paper under the sun, drawing in on himself. Dick wants to shake him. He grasps Tim's calves instead, squeezes, and says as firmly as he can, "You could pretend."

Tim doesn't humor him on everything; he doesn't play dumb. He just blinks, rapidly, and sucks in one cheek.

The nap of his corduroys warms Dick's palms as they move up and down, fingers digging into the line of Tim's sartorius muscle, as he gets up on one knee. "You love undercover work," Dick says and leans in. "Just --"

"Pretend," Tim says, like it's not a question, then smiles slowly.

The first kiss misses, Tim's mouth on the bulb of Dick's nose, and the second does, too. Dick reaches farther, grasping Tim's shoulder and tilting him, until the third finds its mark.

Tim keeps his eyes open, but Dick doesn't need to see where *he's* heading.

He could get lost here. Simple as this, Tim's murmur and smile impressing on Dick's mouth, the slick throb of a tongue and creaking upholstery that sounds like applause.

You're enjoying yourself, Bruce used to say. Again and again, all the time. After a while, he didn't need to add too much; they both knew he meant it. Accordingly, the bulk of Dick's training focused on instilling discipline, sharpening his observation, learning from his environment even as he moved through it. Never getting lost.

The first night Dick met Jason, Jason insisted on going through the skylight after the drugrunners. Dick yanked on the Robin-cape and hissed, "Kid, what's he always say, huh? Observe in order to *preserve*."

Jason scowled; Dick pressed the point. Finally, Jason twisted like an alleycat and shoved him away. "Never heard that. Heard a lot of bullshit from him, but never that."

That was probably the first time Dick understood Bruce's frustration with him. At the same time, the fact that this was *Robin*, but trained completely differently, was as difficult to grasp as the betrayal itself stung.

Though he had realized it first with Jason, it was every time he saw the next Robin that the point was driven home, right through the heart. Robin wasn't Dick's; his training had been all about his own flaws, nothing to do with Robin. No wonder he'd stayed away until Bane, and then Jean-Paul. Until Tim came and brought Dick back home a second time. The first time, Tim needed Robin; this time, he needed Batman.

All this isn't going through Dick's mind so much as revisiting him as he kisses Tim. These are familiar memories, their presence as unremarkable as the weight of his hair, the span of his grip.

What *is* remarkable, though, is how natural this feels. He likes kissing Tim. It's as familiar, somehow, as anything else. Vaguely, he thinks this should be a revelation, shocking in its novelty, brand-new and unsettling.

It isn't. It's right, and warm, and Tim's hair is silky under Dick's hand. Tim breathes hard, his chest bumping Dick's other hand, the skin over his pectoral warmer than a fever.

They fit together. Then again, Dick has never kissed anyone -- aside from Selina during one of her manic kamikaze taunts, or maybe the first few teeth-clacking jolts with Babs -- whom he didn't fit with. Fitting goes with kissing just as much as tongue and breath do.

Free of stubble, Tim's jaw warms under Dick's mouth; his breath beats damply into Dick's ear, matching his pulse. He shivers and exhales a half-word when Dick sucks a trail down his throat. Down to the scar from the first fight with Jason -- when Dick presses the flat of his tongue there, Tim's head jerks back, his eyes snap open.

"Sorry --" Dick kisses back to Tim's mouth, stoppering the apologetic reassurance and self-deprecation he knows are coming.

He fits his palms around the curves of Tim's shoulders. They bow under his touch, dip and rise as the kiss goes on, and on.

Tim isn't shy. He's reserved, and cautious when he needs to be, but he is not, technically, shy. He's moving against Dick, constantly, hands plucking at clothing, fingertips describing muscle with sure, swift strokes.

The room fills up as the night deepens, until it's brimming with shadows occasionally vivisected by the scalpel-stripe of passing headlights. Dick has his arm around Tim's back, hand cupping the nape of his neck. Tim pushed up Dick's shirt awhile ago and his fingers skate across Dick's chest, pinch and tease and explore. Everything moves in the same bowing dip-rise meter as Dick's free hand cups Tim's hip. His thumb strokes the light trail of hair below Tim's navel, follows it under the waistband.

Leaning back, he tugs at a few curls and grins.

At that, Tim's teeth scrape against Dick's mouth. Dick starts to say something, but the kiss resumes, more deeply. Tim shimmies so that his hips come up, his legs open, and his hand dips under Dick's fly. All at once, as the kiss moves and moves.

Dick smirks, impressed by Tim's grace, but as he starts to pull back -- his hand covers Tim's and he means to ask "You sure?" -- Tim wriggles his fingers and pops the button. The graze of his touch, even through Dick's briefs, pushes a startled little grunt from Dick's open mouth.

Tim's smile curves, just for a second, before he's kissing Dick again. He's using the back of his wrist, jerking it, to work down the zipper.

"Pretend," he whispers when Dick moves.

He pulls at Tim's waist until Tim straddles one of his legs, then works down Tim's own fly.

"I am," Dick mutters, lips on Tim's temple and cheek. All possible angles are awkward, but he gets a fairly decent one and works three fingers into the heat inside Tim's boxers. "See?"

He can't tell if Tim's smiling or grimacing, but they're both moving again, a little faster, making out like -- well, they're pretending. Dick doesn't know *what* the act is, but he must be pretty good at it, if Tim's reactions are any indication.

In the heated pressure of the kiss, maybe the act melted away. Dick certainly believes it did. Bodies don't lie. Tim moves with him, against him, petting his cock lightly and fucking his tongue in and out, slowly, then fast. Dick stretches and thrusts, firms his grip on Tim's cock and pulls; his skin is taut, filled with heat lighter than air, buoying him up against Tim's body.

Time is no longer composed of seconds and minutes. It comes measured in pressure and thrums, strokes and twists, beads of sweat over Tim's lip and the relative numbness of Dick's mouth.

At some point, Tim stretches back and looks down at their hands, their opened pants. When he glances at Dick, his eyes move faster than light. His weight on Dick's leg vanishes and he's moving backward, into the hall, flicking off the light as he goes. Dick gives chase, laughing, his bare feet squeaking on the hardwood.

When he catches Tim -- there's no catching, not with Tim waiting in the middle of the hall, head cocked, but it's the principle of the thing -- Dick rushes at him, arms spread. He can already feel Tim's weight, anticipate the angles of his limbs, and he means to lift him up, off his feet. But Tim shifts and drops; Dick thumps against the wall. Three framed pictures shudder above him and one falls to the floor.

He should pick it up. He should apologize. He should do *something* -- God knows each muscle in his body is doing its own damn thing right now. His hands are curving, cupping, dropping onto Tim's shoulders again. Tim is cracking his knees on the floor, his eyes downcast, his mouth dark and wet and *open*.

"Jesus, Timmy, I don't --" Dick gets out before his briefs and pants are around his calves. Tim presses his face into the crease of Dick's thigh.

Tim rolls up his right shoulder so Dick's hand is trapped against Tim's cheek. When he tips forward, Dick's hand slides into his hair.

"Tim --" Dick tries again, but Tim shakes his head. He wraps one arm around the back of Dick's knees and strokes his fingertips there as he licks down Dick's shaft and at the hair around its base. "Oh, *Jesus*."

If this is pretending, Dick doesn't want to see telling the truth. He can't conceive what the truth would be, not when Tim's tongue is moving back as his lips move forward. Dick grabs the back of Tim's hair before he can stop himself, the pleasure arcing up his spine. When he loosens his hold, Tim grunts around him, low and almost mean. His fingers tighten, and Tim hums.

Dick is up on his toes, free hand banging the wall, the pictures doing the same, for a long time, his hips rocking as Tim cups his balls and sucks. And *sucks*.

But it's the sight of Tim, eyes half-closed, mouth stretched and cheek filled, that makes Dick, finally, with a wince and a curse, pull away and push Tim back.

"I --" His cock pulses, far louder than his voice. "I think --"

"Don't," Tim says.

Dick huffs out half a laugh as he scrubs the sweat on his face. "You're still --"

Dressed, he was going to say, but Tim is back on his feet, moving down the hall, so maybe that's about to change. Dick has to pause and kick off his pants before he can follow.

The bedroom looks out over the street; the light coming through the open door is silvery, broken up with leaves' shadows, like a streetlight's. Dick pauses on the threshold, thinking he should get his breath or sanity or some stray shred of intelligence back, but then there's Tim, twisting into view from beside the wardrobe. His hands are warm, his face is cool. When he kisses Dick, Dick can taste himself on Tim's lips. He's groaning, the sound unfettered from his mind, rocking his hips against Tim's stomach.

Tim is still fully dressed, just his pants unbuttoned. As they back up, heading, Dick hopes, for the bed, Dick plucks at Tim's shirt, tries to push his pants down. His fingers fit the curve of Tim's ass; he's about to squeeze, or work his knee between Tim's legs, but then the bed arrives.

Tim does a shift-slide. The angle of his shoulders and hands says he's going to flip Dick back and land on top of him.

"Ow," Dick says, going with the flip, limbs sprawling and head bouncing. "Hey, I --"

"Sssh." Tim wraps one hand around Dick's cock, bracing himself with the other on Dick's shoulder; he realizes that this is actually a prime angle. Dick wiggles back until he can kiss Tim again, hard and deep. He works Tim's pants down and grabs his cock.

"What do you want?" Dick strokes him off with twists and squeezes; Tim presses their foreheads together, panting over Dick's face as his nails dig into Dick's shoulder. Dick bites Tim's nose. "Come on. What do you want?"

When Tim lifts his head, his eyes are unfocused. "You."

Dick grins and jacks Tim a little harder and thrusts up into Tim's hand. "You've got *me*. What do you want?"

"You," Tim says again, then shakes his head. "I mean --. What do you want?"

They could do this dance all night, but Dick can feel Tim pushing into his hand, painting him slick and sticky. The rattle of Tim's breath sounds like wind through an empty birdcage. He wishes the lights were on, because then he'd be able to see the flush on Tim's face; he's sure it's there. He licks at it, nibbles, and Tim's sigh comes sharp and loud.

"I want..." Dick wraps his arm around Tim's waist and pulls him up his chest. He cranes his neck to lick the head of Tim's dick, swirling his tongue until the rattle turns to a moan. "I want to suck you off."

"I --"

Dick smacks his lips as he tightens his hands on Tim's hips. He waits a beat until he's sure he has Tim's attention. "I want you to fuck my face."

His cock jumps but Tim's breathing silences. Dick decides that counts as a yes, and slides down, mouth open, until he's taking in the head and top of the shaft.

"God --" Tim gets out before he grabs for the headboard and wheezes.

If they fit while kissing, then this is just another, deeper kiss. Dick knows he's good at this. He knows he wants to do this, knows he can give this to Tim, blow his big, twisty, complicated mind. What he doesn't know -- not until it happens, and then happens again, and again -- that Tim seems to want this. Really wants it, with gasps that sound like curses, nails that scrape across Dick's chest, thrusts that fill his mouth, then overwhelm and nudge Dick's soft palate.

This can't be pretending, not this choking heat, not like this.

Dick pulls himself off, the heat of Tim filling him from head to toe, his hand speeding. He comes with what would be a shout if he could breathe; as it is, he manages a nasal whine. He uses the come on his hand to stroke up behind Tim's balls, corkscrew his finger against the crack. It takes just a rocking nudge from his thumb's knuckle against the hole to sends Tim careening over the edge.

His scalp half-ripped off under Tim's claws, Dick swallows, and again. Finally, having eased Tim out, he pulls him down to lie against his chest. His mind works according to flares and smoke signals right now, a random sequence of Morse-code heartbeats and jumping, zooming muscles. He's going to drift off like this, sticky mouth against Tim's sweaty forehead.

The cold that slaps him when Tim pulls away isn't quite a wave swamping the Titanic's deck, but it might as well be.

"Hey?" Dick's voice is croaky, his jaw popping, and he knuckles his eye. "Where...?"

"Need to clean up," Tim says without turning. The door shuts behind him.

Dick can't let this turn weird. This won't get weird, not if he has anything to say about it. There's no good reason for it to turn weird. He feels far too good, loose down to his toes, and warm, for weirdness to intrude.

He rolls to the edge of the bed and tugs loose the hospital-cornered covers so he can wriggle underneath. He's sweaty and splashed with come, but he's far from caring. When Tim creeps back, Dick pulls him close, holding him from behind. Tim sighs sharply, once, and his elbow catches a bruise on Dick's hip.

Dick sleeps with the scent of Listerine and shampoo in his nose.

*

In the morning, Dick wakes alone. After showering and stealing a shirt that barely fits, he finds Tim in the kitchen. He has an eyedropper in one hand and his gaze fixed on a plate of waffles on the counter before him. Sucking his lip against his teeth, Tim squints and applies the eyedropper -- filled, it's now evident, with maple syrup -- to each tiny square on the waffles.

When he's finished, Tim sets the eyedropper aside and says without looking up, "Morning."

"You made waffles?" Dick snags the plate before Tim can do anything else weird to it.

Tim straightens up and pushes a glass of orange juice down the counter. "I did."

Around a big mouthful, Dick says, "They're good."

Tim cores an apple, then fans the slices out onto his own plate. "I try to be a good host."

The waffles rival Alfred's, which are the best Dick has ever had, and he's eaten breakfast on every continent, in six dimensions and two star systems. Of course they're excellent; Tim has to do everything well. When Dick's finished, he rinses off the plate and watches Tim flick through his schoolbooks as he steadily munches his apple. His hair is wet -- that makes sense, the shower was steamy when Dick got in -- but bits of it are drying at the back and curling up. He looks like a duckling, fresh from the egg.

Dick tugs on Tim's hand and pulls him to his feet. He's about to kiss him when Tim turns his face away. "Syrup," he says and taps Dick's chin. "Sorry. Anyway, I've got --"

Dick thumps the calculus book. "School, right."

Tim nods. "And you have a gymnastics meet, if I'm not mistaken."

"How --? Never mind." Shoshanna Liebenkind's meet *is* this afternoon, all the way uptown at the 63rd Street Y. Dick shakes his head and blows a raspberry against Tim's slow-drying hair. "I'll see you tomorrow?"

Twisting, leading with his shoulder, Tim pushes him away with a grin. "Good luck. Break a leg." He lifts his schoolbag. "Or, really, don't."

*

Shoshanna places fourth in the all-around, but second on bars, and Dick accepts her stepmom's invitation to celebrate at Serendipity. Shoshanna has a breadstick and all of Dick's ice-water; Dick gets her frozen hot chocolate in addition to his own.

"Any...family?" Mrs. Liebenkind twists her wedding ring.

"Down in Gotham," he replies and pushes a piece of chocolate at Shoshanna. "Eat, you're skin and bones."

She sticks her tongue out at him, which is what he was going for. Laughing, he pops the chocolate into her mouth.

"Just parents, then?" Mrs. Liebenkind asks.

Dick gets a familiar, but still weird, sense of doubled-consciousness. He knows she wants to know if he's seeing anyone. At the same time, he *also* knows, despite himself, that if she were as classy as she'd like to appear, she would already know about his connection to the Wayne name.

He dislikes himself intensely for knowing that. Even more for *thinking* it.

"A brother," he replies when she narrows her eyes. "Two, I mean."

More double-vision then -- a flash of memory (Tim's face, slick with kissing, lips parted as he panted) that gets laid over the standard meaning of family, of brother. The fact is, Jason and Tim *are* his brothers. Not simply due legal papers, but because they are, with Bruce and Alfred, Roy and Donna and Wally, the closest thing Dick has to a family. The best thing.

"We're pretty close," he adds. The skin across his cheeks and nose tenses and heats. He pushes more chocolate at Shoshanna. "Hey, squirt, this is a *party*, not a fast. C'mon."

*

"The angles're fucked," Jason says on the phone the next morning. It's barely light out, Dick has only been in bed for an hour after patrol, and he can't quite make Jason's words make sense.

"The whats are what'ed?" Dick sits up and shakes the crust out of his eyes. He took a garbage can to his bad knee last night; the ache's not as bad as it could be, but he's going to need to use the whirlpool at the gym before work if he wants to keep up with the kids.

"Morning, brighteyes. I *said*, the angles are all kinds of fucked." Jason sighs dramatically. Behind him, the screech of traffic and riot of horns can be heard. "On the pictures. You gave me. Of baby bat."

"Jay --"

"Oh, I'm *so* very, very sorry. Isn't this line secure?" Jason asks. "I didn't say anything."

Dick runs his first two knuckles across the fibular collateral ligament, working at the ache. He's half-hard and damn sleepy.

"After all, I don't *get* a secure line," Jason says. "Paranoid fucker."

"Right." Dick flexes his foot. Definitely going to need the whirlpool. "Thanks for the info."

He goes back to sleep and dreams about Jason photographing Tim in a Soho studio-loft, haranguing him as Tim pouts and poses like Zoolander.

*

The next night, he's late for his rendezvous in Gotham. He's still stripping off his civvies, turning into Nightwing, as he climbs onto a roof down by the piers.

"Pile-up on the Thruway," he whispers and drops into place behind Robin.

There is little trace of Tim tonight; he's thoroughly Robin, a still, sharp little shadow wearing night-vision goggles and an audio bud in one ear. Wordlessly, he passes spare equipment to Dick before he leans forward again. His mouth is drawn in a tight frown.

Calapine and the Latvians seem to be making a bid for the harbor's drug trade. Tonight, they're meeting with some survivors of Black Mask's crew to hammer out the details.

Dick assumes that Robin is doing routine surveillance, a little intelligence-gathering for some larger investigation. If he is, then he doesn't need Dick. Which means Dick is here for other reasons. For company on the stake-out, maybe, or -- since stake-outs are fairly regular things -- company *later*. Dick rocks his weight from foot to foot, glad that with his back to him, Tim can't see his stupid grin.

The meet breaks up and the gangsters wander out to the parking lot, lighting cigarettes and talking over the next day's race card at Gotham Downs. Dick goes to tap Robin's shoulder and ask what's next.

Robin, however, is suddenly out of reach. He's moving up onto a cornice, grasping a line he must have set up earlier in the evening, and riding it down to the parking lot.

The group breaks apart like mercury as Robin lands, then reforms, tight and angry, closing in.

"Which one of you's Juris the Jackal?" Robin asks from the center of the circle. He must know, but he seems to be softening them up, letting their confidence flow a little too high.

Dick lands soundlessly outside the circle, fists at the ready.

Two guys are going for guns, one for a leg-holster that, given how his fingers are extended, probably holds a knife rather than a firearm. Dick takes out a straggler with an elbow to the windpipe. When Robin glances his way, Dick holds up two fingers, the gun sign, then one finger and the slashing sign for knife.

Robin nods as he addresses the muttering circle. "Nobody knows? Shame. I've got something for him, too."

"Got something for you, asshole --" One goon cocks off his safety, but the gun is flying away under Robin's kick before the guy can finish his threat. He lands on his hands and knees when Dick swings an escrima against his kidneys.

Robin slides to the left, opening a space for Dick to vault over the fallen man and complete the swing against another guy's solar plexus.

"Anyone else?" Robin looks around. "This is really simple. I just want Juris." He dips his shoulder and twists at the waist, shuffling his feet until he and Dick are lined up, back to back, slowly turning in a circle. Bruce calls this maneuver #27, but neither of them needs to get technical, not when they move so well together. "We should drop all his buddies and leave him the last man standing."

"That'd be fun." Dick tosses the stick from hand to hand. "I'd be up for that."

"Good to hear," Robin replies, cape snapping as he downs another guy.

He doesn't know why Robin wants this Juris, but that's not his concern, not just now. Instead, he concentrates on thinning the herd that much more, disarming the nearest two thugs, and keeping in line with Robin.

"MCU's coming for you, Jackal." Robin nudges Dick's hip and Dick drops forward into a pommel-position, letting Robin tuck and roll backwards over him. When he lands, Dick gets a glimpse of Robin's face -- tense and pale, twin stains of flush high on his cheeks, disappearing under the mask -- before they switch positions again. "Why not do us all a favor and talk to me first?"

The only replies that come are in the form of three guns and two knives. Dick goes high while Robin ducks low. When the sticks are down and his pulse is pounding just the way he likes it, adrenaline nearly as good as orgasm, five men are down.

That leaves just the squirrelly guy in a Members Only jacket. He looks pretty green around the gills, but he's raising a Saturday night special with a steady hand. Dick taps his chin twice, Robin tucks in his elbows, and they spring on either side of Squirelly. Dick holds him down with boot on the nape of his neck while Robin gets the zip-strips out of his belt.

"Juris, Juris. You didn't have to go through all this rigmarole." Robin's voice sounds almost mournful.

Into the gravel, Juris spits out a long string of Baltic curses.

"My *mother*?" Robin jerks both of Juris's arms a little harder than necessary, wrenching them in their sockets, and zips the cuffs closed. "That was uncalled for, don't you think?"

Dick cuffs the two remaining guys -- everyone else has fled -- and realizes, a beat later, that Robin was addressing him. He blows the hair out of his eyes and grins. "Never cool, trashtalking the mom."

Robin nods, clicking shut the disposable cell phone after calling in the bust to MCU.

He kicks Juris one more time in the ribs and adds his own Latvian curse before accepting Dick's hand up to the fire escape.

"What was *that* about?" Dick gets Robin pinned against the central air unit on the roof and tries for the Bat-voice. "Little hard on him, weren't you?"

The mask's lenses are opaque, Robin's chin sharp as a pair of scissors. When he speaks, his lips are colorless, even in the glare of a passing dirigible. "He's been roughing up some kids west of here."

West of here is the entire city.

"Fine," Dick says and steps back. "Your call."

"Yes, it is."

Dick knows he won't get anything more, so he waits for Robin to lead him through the rest of the patrol. From the harbor, they move northward, following the squawk of the police band and the sweep of the dirigibles' lights.

They win two more fights and take down a crying girl who held up a bodega. Dick's pulse is racing, his muscles burning with the need to keep going, find more action. He's always reacted bodily before remembering to observe. He's trying now, however, to think, to act, *differently*. To see first, then move.

Bruce and Tim and Barbara always think before they speak, observe before they move. Look before they leap, really, and it's the rare cliché that Dick's met and hasn't loved.

Those he loves most all share this in common, this analytical intelligence that directs everything they do. Dick must be drawn to it, simple as that.

Jason, as usual, remains the exception to this -- and every other -- rule. He doesn't look, but his tendency to fly in with fists raised and teeth bared is hardly like Dick, either.

Not that Tim moves poorly or at all awkwardly. Dick spends the entire patrol with one eye on Tim, *observing*, and, frankly, admiring. From the outset, from his earliest days as Robin, Tim's grace has been entirely his own. Distinctive as a starling's, careful as it is clean, Tim's style isn't powerful like Bruce's, explosive like Jason's, or acrobatic as Dick has been told his own is.

Bruce had to relearn grace. After he bulked up to gain the power he needed, all his prep-school ballroom dancing and varsity shortstop dexterity had vanished under the weight of his musculature. Dick knows that his example helped Bruce relearn what he needed; the thought doesn't give him the usual anxious cramp that warns him against arrogance. He can acknowledge that he taught Bruce something. It's just a drop in the bucket compared to what he learned from Bruce.

Most of Tim's hand to hand techniques and just about all his grapple-work bears the stamp of the Bat. The adjustments, for his much lighter weight, his smaller arm-span and narrower, quicker frame, are Tim's own. But Dick can see himself in Tim's kicks and pivots, even distinguish the traces of advice given long ago on the finer points of the grapple, its clasp and release, the flight after it.

He wonders what Bruce sees, how he feels, when he watches them on patrol. Beyond, that is, flaws and weaknesses that demand correction. Bruce might be proud of what he sees, the evidence of his training well-mastered, but Dick cannot be sure. When he watched Shoshanna execute her dismount from the bars, the move they'd worked on almost every afternoon for three and a half weeks, Dick *was* proud.

He knows he was. When he sees the traces of his influence and advice in Tim, the feeling isn't the same. He's Shoshanna's teacher, sure, but he isn't Bruce -- he's no one's mentor. He and Tim are both, just at different times, Robin. They're equals for that, even though the suit hasn't been his for a very long time. The suit barely resembles his old one at this point. But they still share it, move together in concert, as fellows or mates.

Brothers, really. Brother means something to Dick that other people wouldn't understand, but all he has is his own mind, his own heart; Tim is every bit his brother in a kiss as he is on patrol.

As they wrap up for the night, Dick is loose and slightly abuzz. To get back into his apartment, Tim has rigged up a zip-line into the solarium that sprouts from the back of the brownstone. There are no roofs higher than the brownstone's, so the line, mingled with the usual tangle of utility and washing lines, runs parallel to the dark glass.

They drop through a panel that only *looks* like glass -- it is in fact a light construct designed by Mr. Terrific -- and land in the dark, surrounded by climbing vines and spiky-leafed trees in pots.

"This yours?" Dick asks as Tim folds up his cape and loosens the jersey's neckline. The solarium is humid and quite warm; somewhere near the exit, water splashes occasionally. He checks it and finds an old basin, its mosaic cracked and dimmed by condensation. Inside, two ancient carp, each bigger than his foot, pass through the weeds.

"Communal for the building." Tim's hand is on the doorknob as he looks over his shoulder.

Dick bounces on the balls of his feet. The adrenaline of a good patrol and the expectation of an even better night course through him.

Tim's brow shines with the solvent that removed his mask as he frowns. "What are you doing?"

Dick swallows and slows down. He can't stop, but he slows. "...bouncing?"

Tim folds his arms. "I'm pretty tired. Just going to turn in."

Waggling his eyebrows, Dick starts to say something about tucking him in, but Tim shakes his head. No one's gestures are smaller, more precisely *meaningful*, than Tim's. Maybe Bruce's, but he has a much larger canvas to work with.

In the dark, it's hard to be sure, but it feels as if Tim is looking through Dick, past him, when he adds, "I'll call you."

Dick stops, mid-bounce. His palms slap against his sides. "Tim --"

"Soon as I can," Tim says flatly, "I'll give you a call."

The back of Dick's throat itches. "Are you blowing me off?"

Tim turns and opens the door. "Night, Dick."

"You're blowing me off!" The humidity coats his face with sweat to match the heat from within.

The door shuts behind Tim.

The adrenaline rushes out through Dick's feet. Inside his costume, his skin is clammy, ill-fitting.

*

As two days pass without a word from Tim, Dick exercises his prodigious skill at the hair-splittingly arcane logic of regret. He should have done something besides stand there like one of the old plants. He should have gone after Tim. He should have shoved through the door, chased Tim down, made him -- made him *what*, exactly?

Tim didn't want to finish the night out with Dick. Nothing could be simpler.

It's the sort of fact that Dick has been longing to find, but its simplicity is no comfort at all. He's having a hell of a time accepting it. Getting over it is going to be another chore altogether.

Still, he's been here before. He can do this. The one certain thing he has learned since this whole case started is that Tim's life is every bit as complicated as Dick's own, as anyone else's. Tim makes it look -- not *easy*, never that, but so precise and controlled that Dick was fooled for a long, long time.

Tim's just a kid. A really smart, pretty frighteningly competent kid, but still, always, a kid. He has lost more than anyone they know, and he keeps going. Take away all the grief, even his job as Robin, and Tim would still be a kid who just broke up with his boyfriend. Probably his first boyfriend. He's probably still dealing with having had a boyfriend in the first place.

Dick is suitably ashamed of himself. For being hurt, for even imagining going after Tim that night, for being selfish when he should have been anything but.

There's also the fact that Tim might be more than a little freaked out by having slept with his big brother. While Dick can't find the necessary sincerity to regret that -- he's never regretted sex, not when it was freely given and shared -- let alone be ashamed, he does want to kick himself for mishandling the aftermath.

Kick himself, slam his head in a car door, something like that.

He calls Tim, several times a day, more times than he count. He apologizes to the voicemail every way he knows how, and makes up a few more methods on the fly.

When the Outsiders spend nearly seventy-two hours hunting a child-sex trafficker through the ruins of Bialya, Dick continues to make the calls. Every four hours, almost like clockwork.

The Pequod is cruising the upper stratosphere above Finland when he tries the call again. He gave up looking for a private spot on the way over; this team has a way of following him around, turning up at the strangest times.

Right now, it's well past two-thirty Gotham time, but the 'Quod's lounge is full.

"Pretty boy must've fucked up *bad*," Owen says to Anissa. She doesn't hide her smile very well.

Grace pats Dick's head roughly. "Your hair isn't very shiny *at all*," she says as he ducks. "This must be serious."

"Shut up," Dick says as he moves behind Rex, who has helpfully turned into a cinderblock wall. "All of you, just --"

"Yeah, Gracie, shut up," Owen chirps. Grace wraps him in a headlock and they tussle; Katsu lifts her feet as they roll into her chair.

Times like these are the *only* times Dick doesn't miss Roy's presence on the team. These guys are bad enough, but Roy would have a field day with him right now.

He returns to New York and resumes his classes and nightly patrols.

He's just swinging his leg over the windowsill to his loft early one morning when his cell phone rings. The number belongs to a cell phone from Gotham Tel, but Dick doesn't recognize the name "P. Schindler".

"Hello?" Dick's boots ring as they hit the floor.

"Robbie Malone, is this Robbie Malone?" The voice on the other end is a guy's, with a light Gotham accent.

"Sure, who's this?" Dick shakes his head to clear it and leans against the wall.

"Look, I heard you were looking for me? And that's just *creepy*, man."

"I --. How did you get this number?"

The guy laughs. "Hell if I know. Somebody gave it to somebody who gave it me." He pauses, then adds in a lowered voice, "You're not a collection agency, are you?"

Dick rolls his forehead against the window. "No, nothing like that. Who *are* you?"

"Pete Schindler, who the hell are you?" The guy laughs a little, low, like he's savoring the taste of it. "What I want to know is, why're you looking for me when you don't even know me?"

Someone from the gay radicals, then, if he's calling Dick by the Malone alias. Back at the queer club, Dick felt just like this: slightly confused, as if everyone spoke a slightly different dialect than his own. He recognized the sounds and moods, but couldn't seem to adjust himself in order to move from recognition to understanding.

"I --" Dick pauses. The words that come out make more sense than he's comfortable with. "I'm looking for Tim. Tim Drake."

"Jesus *fuck*." Pete exhales noisily; in the quiet afterward, Dick makes out vague sounds of traffic. When Pete does speak again, Dick's shoulders jerk to attention. "Last I heard, young Timothy was still sitting pretty up in that trustafarian bachelor pad of his."

So he knows that Tim has money. Dick isn't surprised, but the confirmation is very welcome. "Last -- when was this?"

"Week, maybe? No, we've been on the road. Couple weeks. Definitely less than a month."

Dick paces across the center of the loft, phone tucked against his shoulder as his arms swing and hands open and close. "So you haven't seen him, or --"

"Why would I see him?" Pete cuts in, his voice sharp. "Bastard didn't want anything to do with me."

Ah-*ha*, Dick doesn't say, although the anger coming off Pete through the phone goes a long way to confirming his theory that this guy is involved in the blackmail. "So," Dick says carefully, "you...fought?"

"You a cop?" Pete asks, his tone as faux-casual as Dick's own.

"No, why?"

"You ask a hell of a lot of questions for someone who's not a cop."

Dick jumps backward and lands on the kitchen counter. "Why're you afraid of the cops?"

"Why am I..." As he trails off, Pete laughs hoarsely. "Other than their usual racist, classist bullshit? No reason."

Something's going on here, something secret and, possibly, dangerous. Dick holds himself still.

"Look," Pete adds, "what's this got to do with Tim?"

Dick switches the phone to his other ear and rubs the ache in his temple. "Nothing, I just --." He takes a deep, slow breath. The question is bigger than this conversation, so big he can't even see its outlines. "Honestly? I don't know."

"Some detective you are."

Dick swallows hard and rolls his shoulders. "I --"

"Kidding. Look, much as I *really* don't feel like discussing Master Drake's proclivities and massive, *massive* issues, I'm going to help you out."

"Big of you," Dick says faintly.

Pete laughs again. "I'm a humanitarian, what can I say? So, you in Gotham?"

Dick straightens his spine and bounces a little, heels drumming the cupboards. "I can be, yeah."

"We're hitting the Big Stink tomorrow," Pete says. "Get dolled up, call yourself the welcome wagon, and we'll talk."

"Right, great --" Dick scribbles down the address, somewhere in the depths of Robbinsville. He's about to say thanks when Pete interrupts.

"Just so you know, I'm a tulip guy. No roses, not if you value your life."

Schindler's not the first wisecracking blackmailer Dick has run across, but he is the first one who's actually funny. What that means, though, is problematic. Dick needs to be on his guard if he's going to get useful information.

The next afternoon, dressed as casually as he remembers the club's denizens, Dick parks his bike on the street. Tulips in hand, he strolls up the short driveway. The neighborhood is shabby, bungalows with swaybacked porches interspersed among drab postwar apartment buildings. They could be in Queens or Brooklyn, lower Westchester or -- anywhere, really.

Farther down the driveway, past a beat-up van, the door to freestanding garage is open, but Dick tries the front door first. A tiny guy, hair flattened on one side, green eyes bloodshot and chin prickly with stubble, shuts the door in his face when Dick mentions Tim's name.

Dick knocks again. "I'm looking for Pete."

The door opens only as far as the deadbolt chain will allow. "Any friend of Drake's is no friend of Pete's."

"I'm just looking for Pete." Dick reminds himself to stay on-task. Whatever this guy's hiding is none of his business; his anger toward Tim, however, could be valuable. He shakes the flowers in their paper. "See? Tulips."

"Pete's out with the van," Mr. Cranky says, ignoring the tulips.

"Great, thanks!" Dick grins to underline his gratitude, but the door is already closing.

The driveway's asphalt is cracked and bumpy, scattered with pebbles. Dick takes his time getting to the van, which is backed up to the garage, its stereo blaring raucous punk music.

Pete Schindler is a lanky guy with messy, dark blond hair. Pete Schindler is the guy in the photographs with Tim; Dick knows his body, the tattoo on his hip and what he looks like during sex. Knowledge doubles his perception, the ghosts of Pete's clasp on Tim's shoulder and his open mouth pressed to Tim's throat overlaying the mundane details, monochrome above full color. The late afternoon sunlight licks his hair into auburn and gold as he bends behind the van, then disappears.

On the phone, he sounded older, whatever that means. But he can't be much older than Tim, not nearly as old as Dick. *That* thought threatens to do a twisty clench to Dick's stomach, but he shakes his head and ignores it.

"Lazy bastard, Billy!" Pete calls, shading his eyes as he comes back into view. When he sees that it's Dick, not whoever Billy is, Pete blows the hair out of his eyes and cocks his head. "Jesus, you really brought me flowers?"

Dick thrusts the bouquet at him. "I thought it was required."

Pete peeks into the paper and his grin is sudden and sunny, so wide his eyes crinkle up. Dick thinks of the new Flash and has to steel himself against the guy's obvious charm.

"You must be this tall to ride this ride," Pete says as he shakes Dick's hand. "So. Drake, huh? How do you know *him*?"

Dick scratches the seam of his jeans and follows Pete around to the back of the van. Music equipment is scattered everywhere, in and out of the van, across the floor of the garage.

"We're friends," Dick says finally. "I guess you could say --"

Hoisting a guitar case, then passing it to Dick, Pete snorts with laughter. "Tim doesn't have any friends."

Dick looks around the garage, but there's no obvious place to put the guitar. He stands there, feeling ridiculous and not knowing what to say. Tim *does* have friends, doesn't he? He's got the Titans and -- well, Dick and the Flash.

"Wait a sec --" Pete takes a dramatic step backward and holds up his hands. "You're not the ex, are you?"

"What? No." Dick switches the guitar to his other hand. "The who?"

"Some asshole Tim met at camp somewhere. Kansas boy? You look like him." Pete waves his hand. "I mean, like Tim described him. Big guy, black hair, blue eyes."

The guitar thumps Dick's leg and he looks around all over again for a place to put it, finally setting it down in the back of the garage. For several moments, he's got too much to process, not least of all his apparent resemblance to *Superboy*. Jesus.

He sifts as quickly as he can through all the secrets and settles finally on a shred of the truth. "Kon--. Conner? No, I'm not --. I'm really not him."

Pete leans against the van's back door, arms loosely crossed -- he has, Dick can't help but note, very fine definition in his muscles -- and nods. "Good deal. I kind of want to beat his face in, you know. Even..." He looks away, and upward, eyes closing briefly. "Even now."

Still unsettled, his muscles jumping and joints rolling loose, Dick searches for something else to say. "He's --. He died. Almost two years now."

"Oh, *Christ*." Pete grabs an amp and moves it all of three feet. Under his breath, face a little twisted, he mutters, "Jesus, *Tim*." He kicks the amp and squares his shoulders, as if he has to prepare himself to meet Dick's eyes again. "I dunno, man. I'm not exactly the guy to talk to. Not when it comes to Tim."

"Yeah, well --" Dick grabs another amp and holds it out to Pete. "You're here, I'm here."

As they unload the truck and start to organize the chaos in the garage, Dick has to remind himself that, whatever else this is, this is an interrogation. An interview, first and foremost. He's here to find out who's trying to blackmail Tim.

All the same, he can understand right off the bat why Tim liked this guy. He's good-looking, sure, but he's also laidback and interesting. Funny, too, in that deadpan way that Dick associates with Tim. This appreciation, of course, depends on Dick suspending *all* doubts concerning Tim actually picking someone up, let alone having a boyfriend.

Pete met Tim, so his story to Dick goes, when he was out after a concert late one night.

"So late it's early, you know?" Pete says and Dick nods as he stacks the amps.

He can see it perfectly: he knows that hour as well as he knows his own body, the pearly light sticky and hesitant on the horizon, the shadows still stuck at midnight, while the air gets a little fresher and the dark starts to unravel, mote by mote. Pete was stopping at each Gotham Gazette box to tag its window.

"You know," he says impatiently when Dick asks. "Tagging. Had my trusty Sharpie, and I was getting the word out."

So he was tagging a statement about "corporate disinformation" when he heard a fight up the street. He saw Robin wrestling a street person, who managed to break free and book toward Pete. Pete was yelling at Robin -- and here Dick has to swallow again, because if Pete knows Tim is Robin, then the photographic blackmail is probably just the beginning -- when something hit his head and knocked him out.

"Boomerang," Pete says, leaning over to show Dick the scar high on his temple. "Took twelve stitches. Fucking vigilantes, you know?"

"Batarang," Dick replies, but covers it with a cough.

"So I wake up in Mercy East with this *guy* watching me. Tim." Pete sits down heavily and knots his fingers together. "Said Robin asked him to call an ambulance."

"Oh," Dick says. "Well, that's good, right?"

"Notice Robin *didn't* pay my hospital bill," Pete adds and laughs. "Anyway, Tim's there and he's -- well, you know him. Hot, but --" He shrugs. "Fucking *tense*."

Dick nods. That much is true, however bizarre it is to hear it from a stranger's mouth. It's not like Tim to miss a 'rang throw, either. If Pete had been out of sight and then just popped up, yelling, though, it's a little more understandable.

"Soon as I was awake, he started making excuses to leave." Pete crosses his legs, uncrosses them, then pulls one knee up to his chest. "Not that he had to stay. So, yeah. I admit it. I was poking him, as much as I could with the world's worst fucking headache, and he was clucking like a hen. He's a blast to flirt with."

When Pete pauses, Dick should say something. Anything, but he seems to have forgotten the English language. He shrugs and gestures for Pete to continue.

"Finally, I just gave him my number and told him not to call until the closet'd burned down behind him." Pete smiles, but it isn't for Dick's benefit. The smile is vague and distant; it fades slowly. Pete shakes himself and meets Dick's eye. "Just don't have time for closet drama. *You* know what I'm talking about."

Dick would back up, but he's hemmed in by amplifiers and three drums. "What? No, I'm not --"

He clamps his mouth shut, when Pete raises one dark eyebrow and smirks. When Dick remembers just what kind of sex he's been having lately. It's been several months since he slept with a woman. Not that that *means* anything.

"-- yeah, no time, totally," Dick finishes. Pete's smirk becomes a real smile.

Pete goes on to tell him about Tim's call -- Dick allows himself a private, petty little bitch (he doesn't call *me*) -- and their first date. Korean barbecue, for which Tim provided his own tongs, and an all-ages hardcore concert. Dick's mental landscape fills up with new pictures of Tim: hair spiked up like he used to wear it, standing stiff at the edge of a mosh pit, kissing Pete in the alley outside. Failing to disentangle himself before they both reached third base.

"...in public?" Dick has to ask. Tim won't even comb his hair in public; it's rude *and* unhygienic.

Pete rubs his chin, his hair falling into his eyes. "There's something to be said for going public with socially-mandated shame, you know?"

Dick repeats the question to himself, twice, and then again. Even after a fourth try, he's unable to make it make sense. "I don't follow. I mean, if it's your kink, sure, then..."

Pete leans back, stretching out his legs and hooking one arm over an upright guitar case. "No, no. It's like this -- dominant society demands publicity about queer sexuality. Come *out*, come out, wherever you are. Define and announce yourself. So why not go all the way? Really give it to 'em? Stick your tongue down your boyfriend's throat and grab his ass."

Pete's shirt rides up over his waistband; Dick looks away, lest he stare at the fine hairs gathering around his navel, thickening as they move downward. The tattoo on Pete's hipbone is as familiar, now, thanks to the photographs, as Dick's own thumbprint.  
"You're pretty....radical, huh?" Dick asks when Pete wraps up his lecture on gender norms and embracing shame in order to transform it.

Under the sweaty fall of his hair, Pete just blinks. His lips part, then close, as he shakes his head.

"But why does --" Dick casts about for the right words. "Why should it matter, the gender of the person you're making love to?"

Pete smiles long before he manages to reply. "Maybe it shouldn't. But you gotta start somewhere, am I right?"

"Yeah," Dick says. He doesn't follow and Pete doesn't strike him as the type of person to give him a hand.

"It matters to the dominant culture," Pete says. "They *make* it matter. Rich white guys and their hangers-on, all the minions who eat and breathe the bullshit, thinking that if they just play their cards right, *they* can get ahead, they can succeed."

Lucius Fox isn't a minion, Dick's pretty sure. "But --"

Pete isn't even looking at him. He's gazing out the garage door, lips moving silently as he taps out a rhythm on his knee.

"I mean --" Dick fumbles for the right words. He needs to get this conversation back on track, though learning that Pete and his circle support outing and publicity is, he's sure, going to be important. "You sound -- angry? Really political."

When he turns to look at Dick, Pete's expression remains blank and slightly befuddled. Dick's about to say something else, use different phrases, when Pete smirks at him. "Damn. You *are* Tim's friend, aren't you?"

"I --" Dick shrugs and presses down on his bad knee to keep it from jittering. "I don't follow. Again."

Wrinkling up his nose and squinting both eyes, Pete says nasally, "Now, Peter, real progress and substantive change never came from such naivete and object-less rage. Why not direct your considerable energies to more realistic, pragmatic causes? I know several members of the board for an array of useful charities. They'd *love* to have you, I'm sure..."

"Oh, right," Dick replies. Pete is parodying Tim, it's obvious. All the same, it sounds pretty damn reasonable to him. "But --"

"Fuck it!" Pete jumps to his feet, arms spread wide as he turns in a tight circle. "Judgmental, privileged little *prick*."

Dick draws back. "I didn't mean --"

"*Tim*," Pete says. "Tim freaking Drake." His voice dropping, he spins again and throws a beer can at the van. It bounces off and skitters away down the driveway. His shoulders slanting downward, hands balled in fists, Pete glances at Dick. "I miss him."

"What would you do to get him back?" Dick keeps his tone even and locks his gaze to Pete's. He's making headway, finally, navigating through this guy's reckless anger and maudlin sadness. He just has to push. Gently, but push, and make more progress. "Do you want --"

To hurt him? *Punish* him?, Dick was going to say, but Pete stands in front of him, hands stuffed into his pockets, head down. "What, you playing yenta now?"

"No, Jesus, I meant --" Dick holds up his hands. Panic, serrated and instantaneous, slices down his chest and he sucks in a quick breath. He wants to help Tim: that's true. But, even more, he wants Tim, full stop.

He should be embarrassed, ashamed of his selfishness, but all he can do is shrug in Pete's general direction. "Sorry," Dick says. "Just -- go on. Sorry."

"Yeah, well," Pete says and crosses his arms as he leans against the pile of amps. "Timmy doesn't want me back. So."

He should find out more about their breakup -- was it even a breakup? What happened, who broke it off? He *should*, and he knows that, but instead Dick sits forward and says, as sincerely as he can, "I'm sorry. You two sound --"

"Mr. A-List queer with his stupid camera and retrograde, reactionary politics --" Pete's getting worked up again, crumpling another can and tossing it wild. Then he adds, softly and fondly, "Fucking *prick*."

Dick's been trying to protect Tim. That was the mission, to save him from harm and harassment. It's no longer the case.

It hasn't been true for a while now. Whether he realizes that when he sees Pete duck his head and turn away, the nape of his neck catching the light and shining with sweat, or because his thoughts suddenly empty, all images vanishing except for Tim's face, red and thoroughly kissed, his eyes gone wide with a surprise he'd never voice, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that this isn't just a case any more. This is about Dick, and Tim, and Dick and Tim. The sorrow that's twisting Pete is what Dick has been feeling with each message he's left that has gone unanswered.

Dick grabs for whatever sense he can. "Camera?"

Pete cocks his head, looking surprised that Dick's still here. "He never puts that thing *down*. Fucking talented, too, always found the weirdest angles, the sharpest frames. Here --" He jumps into the back of the van and rustles through a couple knapsacks and an immense duffel bag, tossing shirts and underwear and unsleeved CD's over his shoulder. "Here, he did the cover for our EP --"

Dick takes the disc. He saw this picture, blown up and grainy after generations in the photocopier, at the club. That night, however, he'd noticed the text -- Queer Corps \-- and not the image.

Two guys recline on a rooftop at night. They have their arms around each other; the one on the left is shirtless; it's Pete, lying on his back, looking up at and pointing to something in the sky. The one on the right, on his side with his back to the lens is Tim; Dick recognizes his narrow shoulders and the pattern of his hair on his neck. He isn't looking at the sky; his arm across Pete's chest, the angle of his head suggests that he's gazing at his boyfriend.

How do you know that's his boyfriend?, the Bruce-voice in Dick's head wants to know. That's an unwarranted assumption, based on knowledge extraneous to the evidence at hand. Assumptions are --

Dick ignores the voice and traces the profiles with his finger.

"Huh," he says when he feels Pete looking at him. "Would you look at that."

"Way better than the usual collage and markers monstrosity," Pete says softly. He crowds Dick's shoulder to look down at the picture.

"Tim made this?"

"You sound surprised."

"Yeah, I guess..." Dick shivers, which doesn't make any sense; the sun is strong and warm on their backs. "I didn't know he'd taken it up again. The hobby."

Laughing, Pete takes the CD back. "More than a hobby with him. That guy's -- it's *art*."

"Art, sure," Dick says. His heart beats hollowly for the space of several breaths. "Can I have that back?"

Pete's eyebrow tilts upward. "Five bucks."

"Cheap." Dick digs in his back pocket.

"Cheap? Yeah, it's just to cover the production costs."

Dick gives Pete a twenty. "Sorry, I don't have anything smaller --"

"Must be nice." Pete opens his own wallet and frowns. "I can't make change. Road trip cleaned me out."

Dick tells him not to worry about it. *That* gets Pete's hackles up, staining his face with a flush and making him stutter. Dick doesn't seem to have the energy to make nice, however. All he wants is to get out of here. Out of this driveway, out of Gotham, onto his bike. He just wants to be back in his loft, back where it's quiet, where he can be *alone*.

*

That need to be alone fades quickly. Dick has only been home, back in New York, for a few hours when it's gone entirely. Without it, he's left simply alone. Snappish and pissy, and he has only himself to blame.

"Poor baby," Barbara would say during his rehab. When he got like this, overworked and fretful, she'd pat his head and coo insincerely. "Overstimulated, huh? Need your nap?"

He couldn't snap back at her. Much as he wanted to, sometimes, he couldn't, and he didn't. There were several reasons for that, but only one important one. He wasn't there for *her* rehab, after all. He was going to get stronger, get all better, but she'd never had that hope.

For lack of anything better to do until it's time for patrol, he puts on Pete's CD. It's a good thing no one else lives in this building, because the noise blooms like a mushroom cloud and rattles Dick down to his bones. It fits his mood perfectly -- clanging and loud, fast-moving and almost bouncy, if garbage cans and cinderblocks could bounce. The rapid, crashing progression of chords and the singer's hoarse wail remind him of every bad night, when the bad guys get away and the grapples don't connect. When you're nothing like Batman and you'd just settle for being half as good as Vibe or Booster Gold.

Keeping the music on repeat, Dick suits up.

He carries the desperate, grinding rhythm far uptown, twitching his tendons and reverberating against his lungs. All the way up to Fort Tryon Park. If his various sources are to be believed, Nicky Lanzo's getting back in the game there, crystal and pubescent hookers included.

*

He has no luck finding Nicky then, nor the next two nights. No joy in Mudville, and no word from Tim, either.

This sense -- of being just slightly off-balance, plucked by hesitant vertigo -- that has been plaguing him, he should have recognized it. This vague frustration and slight hysteria have little to do with the case, even with Dick himself. This is all Tim, moving with him, radiating from him. This is how he's felt around Tim since the very first. Since Haly's, and a scrawny little kid whose camera-strap looked ready to snap his neck.

Tim, he knows, would point out that that was their *second* meeting. Accuracy and precision, that's all Tim, too. As with Bruce, such subtlety tends to leave Dick just this shy of breathless.

Dick can't remember their first meeting. He wishes he did. He knows the story -- but that's really not the same -- he knelt down to hug a little kid and show him there was nothing to be scared of.

Look how well *that* turned out.

Yet Tim came back, despite everything, despite Dick's inadvertent lie. He came back to the circus, in search of Dick -- just as, later, he'd come to New York when he needed a real Bat -- fully certain that Dick could be what Tim believed him to be.

Over the span of a few days, Queer Corps's music sifts into Dick's consciousness, until it has settled, every bit as implacable and inextricable as the images in the blackmail envelope. Beset by unfamiliar things, angry lyrics and explicit images, he is not all that sure what to do with himself.

He's not sure he is himself any more. Not with Pete Schindler's lyrics and the blackmailer's pictures crowding his mind.

The last track on the EP is "My Little Enemy". Dick listens to it on his headphones, hitting pause at the end of every line, until he has transcribed the lyrics as accurately as he can.

Blue eyes, straight teeth

 

Got everything you ever wanted

 

No one ever told you no

 

Why can't I tell you no?

My little enemy, my privileged comprador

 

My little enemy, my privileged comprador

Blue blood, perfect mind

 

The world's on your plate

 

No one to hold you back

 

Why can't I shove you back?

Dick knows he must still be -- somewhat -- himself, if only because he can't possibly understand how someone could dislike Tim so much.

He understands all too well how someone can *want* like that, but he's never wanted someone he hates. Coveting the enemy just hasn't ever been his thing, not when there are plenty of people in the world he does like. He never understood the appeal -- well before Roy got tangled up with Cheshire, his incomprehension dates all the way back to Selina in her purple dress and barbed whip and double entendres he only vaguely parsed. Besides, how can Tim -- preppy, quiet, handsome little Tim -- be considered anyone's *enemy*? Especially Pete's.

The other songs are less personal, as far as Dick can tell, but no less angry and impassioned. "Bat to the Head" urges the city to rise up against vigilantes. According to Pete's lyrics, Batman doesn't fight crime. He *is* crime. No wonder Tim broke up with him. "Show You Emo" seems to be addressed to someone Dick cannot identify, someone who's makes Pete as angry as Batman and Tim do. When he googles 'emo', he loses several hours to unraveling the various meanings of the term over the years, debates about its applicability, jeremiads decrying its co-optation by bubblegum punks, and on and *on*.

Dick has to admit that the passion Pete and his band bring to the history of punk equals their distrust of vigilantes as well as kids with blue eyes and straight teeth.

*

He can't look at the photos any more. They were troubling enough when they were just evidence. Now that he's met Pete -- now that he's *slept* with Tim -- they've become something a lot closer to pornography.

At the oddest times -- rocking downtown on the 9 train, lifting a toddler onto the padded trapeze -- details come back to him. The width of Pete's hand on Tim's neck, the jut of Tim's cock in his briefs. And then, when Dick is alone, napping before patrol or frying eggs before hitting the sack, those details gather, assemble, *thicken* into full-blown cinematic scenes. He'll roll over to grind against the mattress, or drop the spatula to stuff his fist into his mouth. He wants to touch that sharp curve of Tim's hip -- suck the sweat off his eyebrows -- taste the full, gagging weight of his cock.

Dick tries masturbating. He tries so much that he's going to strip himself raw one of these days. It works, however, only to a point. He can yank out the tension curling in his gut and sloping his shoulders, but that returns soon enough. He doesn't feel *better* after jacking off, just, temporarily, looser.

Masturbating doesn't solve anything, because his problem isn't simply that he'd like to sleep with Tim again. He wants to touch him, and he wants to talk to him. Probe that strange, Byzantine mind of his and make him laugh, see him twist away in pleasure and shove fruitlessly at Dick's shoulder. None of *that* has to do with sex, at least not technically. Or maybe all of it has everything to do with sex.

He's too mixed up and yearning these days. He can't even figure this much out.

*

So he wants Tim for himself. All well and good -- easy, even, in the grand scheme of things -- except for one thing. Tim doesn't seem to want anything to do with him.

Bruce's silence is immovable; Tim's silence, however, feels different. Dick suspects that if he could just find a way in, all would be well. On its way to being well, at least. With Bruce, the weight of his silence feels like a mausoleum wall, cold marble that's never going to erode, not until Bruce breaks it. But with Tim, Dick feels as if he's touching thick drapery, fumbling in the dark for a seam or gap. There must be a way in; he just has to find it.

Dick might just be fooling himself. That's always a distinct, very real possibility. Tim might in fact be as perfectly walled-off as Bruce; Dick might be breaking nails and shattering bones trying to get in.

If that's the case, he won't know what to do with himself.

Tim is a lot like Bruce -- maybe too much like him for their mutual comfort -- but Dick has to believe their differences are as significant as their similarities. Bruce kicked him out several times over the years; Tim has only ever brought him home.

*

Days without a call from Tim, nights devoted to tracking Lanzo, who's gone wispier than a ghost, all set to the ferocious beats of Pete's album, and Dick just wants *something*. Some kind of answer.

There's never just one case, never a single project. This life -- his life -- requires constant juggling and rescheduling. He's got Lanzo on the run, the Outsiders are gearing up for another pass at Oolong Island, and yet all Dick wants to do is find Tim and make things better.

He cartwheels along the stone wall bordering Central Park's western side for thirty-three blocks; he manages to make a grapple flight all the way from South Street Seaport to Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights. On his hands, he rides between the cars of the 7 train from Shea to Fifth Avenue and only wobbles twice.

It's all fairly diverting, but not distracting.

*

Lanzo cowers on the ground, shielding his head, as Dick sheathes his escrima. The sounds of blubbery weeping just get louder the longer Dick stands over him.

Recrossing his arms, Dick asks, "You done, or...?"

"Duh-duh-don' hit me, man, not again!" Lanzo's left eye has swollen shut. His cheeks and chin are greasy with tears and snot. "I'm buh-begging you!"

He just wants answers. That's all.

He could beat them out of Lanzo. He's done it before; he's seen Bruce do it time and again.

Dick rolls his hips to fix his stance and raises his fist. Lanzo's answering cringe makes him grin. It could be just as simple as this -- knuckles shattering jaw, the answers spraying out with the blood and teeth.

"Juh-Jesus, *please*!" Lanzo wraps his arm over his head, a kid hiding from nightmares.

Dick's hand drops and he steps back. Lanzo can't help him. He doesn't have what Dick needs.

Dick already has the answers. He's just not so sure he likes them.

He can't ever be Bruce; he wants to be good enough for Bruce. He'll always want that. But he doesn't want to be the man. He *can't*. Bruce made himself into the Bat. Whatever psychosurgery and years of effort it took, it counts as a tragedy just as much as it is a triumph. Dick had his fill of tragedy before he turned fourteen, never mind everything that's come after.

Bruce needs to be out here fighting, fending off the same nightmare year in and year out. Dick wants to be here; it's what he does best. His *need*, however, is -- something else.

It's the difference between the press-gang and enlistment, between need and desire, between compulsion and compassion.

He pulls Lanzo to his feet, quickly cuffs him, and leaves him for the NYPD.

The answer is Tim, but only in part.

*

In all his web-reading around 'emo', Dick has had to concede that Pete is not the likeliest blackmailer. Queer Corps is a band, and only a band.

"Why didn't you tell me it was just a band?" he asks Barbara late the next morning. He has slept, showered off Lanzo's blood, and he's pulling together his breakfast from the meager contents of his cupboards.

Olives and eggs *could* make a good omelette. Just not in his hands.

Barbara sniffs. "Where's the fun in that?"

"Nice. Real nice." Sighing, Dick fishes out the biggest shards of eggshell from the glop in the pan. "Babs, I just need --"

She's still laughing at him. "I told you, gorgeous," she says when she gets her breath back, "talk to Tim."

"I tried."

"Try harder," she says.

Dick doubts that he *can*. Short of parking himself on Tim's stoop and cuffing him as soon as he makes an appearance, he doesn't know what else to do.

*

The stoop's a lot more comfortable than he'd expected. He has a bottle of Zesti-Aide and a big roast beef sub, as well as the Gotham Gazette, to keep him company. He works the Jumble, then the crossword, while he waits. Tim gets out of class at 3:10, so if he walks home, he should be here by 3:45. If he takes the bus, it'll be closer to 3:30.

Dick got here at one, just in case.

A little after two, a pigeon develops an obsessive interest in his sandwich. He shoos it away; when that doesn't work, he bats it with the paper. The bird just hops down to the next step and resumes pecking around the butcher's paper. Dick kicks it, but it rises in the air, hovering over his knee to crane its neck toward the food. Finally, exasperated, he pours the Zesti-Aide on its back.

Outraged, it beats its wings, soaking him, before flying away.

As he's mopping dry his face, he hears a soft snort. Tim stands at the bottom of the steps, schoolbag over his shoulder.

"Need a hand?" Tim pushes his sunglasses onto the crown of his head.

"Stupid rat with stupid wings." Dick grabs the last napkin and swipes it over his chin. "Hi."

"Hello," Tim says and waits.

Dick spreads his arms. "I'm staking you out."

Tim nods. "Very subtle."

"But you're early."

"I skipped history."

"Then you're doomed to repeat it." Dick's face is hot, though he's been sitting in the shade, and his heartbeat is a little too fast for a resting pace. The pulse is dispersed through his body, making his fingers twitch. "Isn't that how it goes?"

Tim shrugs his left shoulder to keep his bag's strap from sliding down. "So they say."

Dick feels simultaneously rooted in place -- as if, if he stands up or even *gestures*, Tim might just disappear -- and weightless, simply a vague shape of fast-moving air.

"Would you just --. Can I --?" Dick shakes his head. When he stops, Tim is still there. "Jeez, Tim."

"Hm?" Tim moves up three steps. He is seven away from Dick now, but almost within arm's reach.

"You're avoiding me." Dick fails to keep the stupid whine out of his tone. "Blowing me off, and I --"

"Yeah."

"-- I don't --. What?"

Tim tilts his head. His hair falls off his forehead. "I am --. I *was*. Avoiding you."

"Why?" Dick grins and tosses his hair. Barbara calls it his 'don't hurt me, I'm pretty' look. At this point, it can't hurt. He'll try anything. "I'm one of the good guys."

Tim's lips deepen at the corners. "I've heard as much."

Dick hurries to grab his stuff and get to his feet as Tim passes him and unlocks the front door. After the brightness outside, the narrow entryway is startlingly dark. Green squares and multiple Tims dance before Dick's eyes. He shifts from foot to foot while Tim goes through his mail, piece by damn piece, reading each condo ad and gym membership special with equal attention.

"Showing a whole lot of trust here," Dick says, gesturing at the tenants' mail neatly stacked on the hall table.

Tim makes a noncommittal sound, a "rhn" or "ngh", as he retrieves a bulky package from under the table.

"What is this, a commune?" Dick adds, squinting at the large mandala hung at the end of the hall. Its muted golds and reds match the hall's worn carpet and dark wood surprisingly well. "Timmy, I don't know how to break this to you, but I think you're living in a commune."

"Tibetan Buddhists." Tim shifts his bag to the other shoulder and tucks his package under his arm before heading for the stairs. "They owned the building."

"Must be great for the roaches." Following Tim, Dick climbs the steep stairs. At the first landing, he reaches out -- whether to hug Tim or wrestle him into a headlock, he doesn't know -- but Tim dodges and heads for the second flight. Dick's knuckles barely graze Tim's arm.

He has yet to decide whether he will tell Tim about the blackmail. If he does tell him, which Dick knows he should, he has no idea *how* he's going to break the news. Tim appreciates straightforwardness, Dick's sure, but then again, who doesn't?

"I mean," Dick says more loudly, "Buddhists can't kill anything, right? Not even a fly. It's a Gotham rat's *dream*, now that I think about it."

"No-kill traps," Tim replies on the third landing. This building is *exactly* like Tim -- old in its bones, narrow and dark. Dick grins, but Tim isn't looking at him. "And I believe you're thinking of the Jains."

"Maybe I am." Dick crowds against Tim as he unlocks his door and jostles the parcel, making a grab for it. "What *is* this? You building a bomb now or what?"

"The Buddhists maintain this building for visits from their lama." Tim pushes open the door and slides inside, away from Dick. "There are tenants on the third floor, and, now, with me, on the fourth. When the American couple who own the building ran into some financial trouble, the Janet Drake Foundation was happy to lend a hand." He sets down his things, his keys tinkling, and turns back to Dick, adjusting the strap of his bag. He touches the parcel. "This is developer fluid from a lab in Boston. I suppose you *could* make it into an explosive. I happen to prefer the darks it coaxes out of the photographic paper." He crosses his arms, leaning against the wall. "Anything else?"

Dick meets his eye, and keeps his gaze locked, as he closes the door and leans against it, crossing his own arms. He's surprised to find that he can keep his own tone nearly as even as Tim's. "So you found yourself a building with convenient roof access and not many nosy neighbors. Tibetan Buddhists also occasionally consume red meat. I still think no-kill traps are stupid. You're probably getting a nice tax write-off for the charitable aid. And --" He takes a breath and eases off the door, closing the distance between them. "-- What the *hell* is wrong with you? I suspect drugs, brainwashing, and-or, not simply or, alien possession. Care to comment?"

Tim looks up at him, blinks, and nods. "I'm -- I've been making a lot of changes. Lately."

Corded heat twists through Dick's arms and around his lungs. This time, it isn't so easy to keep his voice nice and flat. "I noticed."

There is a fine spray of faint freckles high on Tim's cheek, nearly to his eye sockets. Just a shade or two darker than his skin and tiny as pencil-points. Dick would like to rub the pad of his thumb over them, test their texture. In twenty years, that's where the crow's feet will fan out from Tim's steady, unearthly blue eyes. For a split-second, Dick's convinced that the freckles are skin irritations caused by the mask. Snorting, he ducks his head until his grin fades.

"This -- answering questions? This is..." Tim's jaw clicks as he works it back and forth. He smiles tightly. "This is my new campaign for transparency."

"Your...what?" Dick shakes his head. "You're running for office?"

"Because that went so well for Ollie," Tim says. "No, I mean --" He squeezes his eyes shut, and Dick gets another hint of the crow's feet to come. "I'm just sick of pretending."

"Uh-huh," Dick says gently and nods. "I'm still not following."

Tim's shoulders move as he takes a breath; they roll back, and out, his arms twisting so his palms open to his sides. His bag slips off his arm, hitting the floor as he tips his head against the wall and takes another breath. The skin on his throat shows nearly every vein, it's so delicate; the hollows under his jaw, along the tendons, might as well as be pearl-diving depths, they're so dark.

"Tim --" Dick says at the same time that Tim opens his eyes and says, "What I mean --"

They both stop and Dick takes a step forward, touching Tim's right palm, tilting his head. "Tim, I --" He trips on Tim's bag as Tim shakes his head 'no'. "Crap, gimme a sec --"

The bag's flap wasn't latched, and his kick knocked the contents halfway out. He leans over to gather them -- notebooks and a three-ring binder, several pens, a paperback copy of Tolstoy, and a manila envelope wrapped closed with red string.

The envelope matches the one he got with the blackmail note.

His first thought is that the blackmailers gave up on him and went directly for Tim. 'Straight for Tim', you could say, if you're Dick and stupid jokes overtake your slow little mind at the worst of times.

The envelope bends in his grip, just like the other one did back in Yolanda's office, as Dick looks up at Tim. Jason said the photos' angles were wrong; the blackmail came to Dick's work address; Tim moved out after some sort of fight with Bruce; Pete said Tim never put his camera down. It all comes together.

When Tim closes his eyes again, that's all the confirmation Dick needs.

"This was a test?" Dick sweeps the envelope down through the air. "A fucking test. *Fuck*."

"You have been hanging around Jason a lot," Tim says. He's terribly calm. Arctically so.

"How would you know?"

Tim's lips go thin. "Surveillance."

Of course. You're not a good Bat if you don't watch. Barbara and Tim -- even *Jason* -- know that as well as Bruce. Laughter squeezes, somehow, through the marble slab covering Dick's chest. "You jealous of blue Jay, little brother?"

"He's affecting your vocabulary. Pretty crudely, too."

Dick's feet no longer feel fully attached to his ankles; he slams his fist into the wall and bounces back, cursing, when his knuckles smack against the concrete-hard plaster. "Get me a dictionary --" He bangs into the opposite wall, stumbling against the corner of the hallway, and hits his head on the wall as he slides down. "I'll catch up. From the goddamn locked ward at Arkham."

Tim remains silent, crossing to stand opposite Dick. From this angle on the floor, he looks long and jagged, almost like a stalactite.

Laughter burns and sizzles across Dick's skin and lips. Jason said the angles were wrong; Pete said it wasn't a hobby, it was art. Dick doesn't know what to call this, this *scheme* of Tim's, this --.

"What *is* this?" Dick rolls his fists against his eyes and asks again. "A test, or *what*?"

Tim shakes his head.

"Not a yes-or-no question!" Dick's voice is high, broken, like he's speaking around shattered glass. His skull throbs, so he bangs it against the wall again.

"Don't --" Tim looks startled to hear himself talk and closes his mouth, pressing his lips together.

"Don't what? It's okay to send me on some wild goose chase, okay to screw with my *head*, but -- what? God forbid I get a bruise?"

"No," Tim says. His shoulders tilt downward as he looks at his feet.

"Come here," Dick says, but Tim doesn't move. "God *damn* it, just --"

He's moving awkwardly through all the emotion, and so Tim has plenty of time to dodge the knee-tackle that Dick was planning, but -- Tim doesn't move and Dick misjudges the distance, so he bangs his shoulder against the wall while wrapping one arm around Tim's knees and yanking him to the floor.

It's like wrestling a rag doll, or Scarecrow. Bruce would hit back -- anyone would, Roy or Jay, Helena or Babs, with teeth in Dick's hand and knee to his groin. Tim flops, his eyes rolling and lips parting, as Dick rolls him over and pins him.

"It's Bruce, isn't it?" He's looking down at Tim's livid face and dark eyes, hair tangled over his forehead, and coming to an answer. "Why you moved out, why you sent those pictures? What shit did he pull this time?"

Tim shakes his head again, jaw working. Dick shakes him, wondering which one of them is crazier, who gets to count as hysterical here.

Finally, Tim says, "No."

"No, what?" All Tim *can* say, apparently, is 'no'. "He didn't fire you, did he?"

"No."

That could be an answer or the sum of Tim's entire philosophy. Dick doesn't *know*, and he's shivering with adrenaline as well as anxiety. His mind spins out reasons and possibilities -- Bruce kicked Tim out, fired Robin, went rogue again, found out about Pete -- as fast as his heart beats. Anything could be true; it could all be as false as the threat of blackmail.

Dick sits back on his heels, raking both hands through his hair and twisting his fingers, tugging at his scalp. Tim eyes him, but doesn't move. Breathing hard, Dick offers him a hand, but Tim ignores him.

"C'mere," Dick says, a lot more harshly than he'd intended, and hauls Tim up by the wrist until they're almost nose-to-nose. More softly, he adds, "Tim."

Bruce has told him, time and again, in word and in deed, to watch himself. To keep his emotions in check. And although Dick would rather die than become a robot -- as if he could be like Bruce, he'd just fuck *that* up, too -- he kind of wishes he had a tenth of Tim's control. He's laughing again, helplessly, at the thought of fucking up any attempt at going robotic.

Tim shifts, just once. The kid can even control his goddamn *unease*. To keep him in place, Dick grabs the back of Tim's hair and shakes him gently.

"You drive me crazy, you know that?"

Tim smiles at that, or, at least, his mouth curves, and he exhales.

"It's not a joke," Dick says. "I want to wring your neck right now."

Tim's lashes brush his cheek as he blinks. The tendons in his neck shift against Dick's palm. Clammy sweat sticks to Dick's hand.

"I want to shake you --" Dick shakes Tim's head again for emphasis, and Tim's eyes close as he goes with it. "Shake you until you start making sense."

"I could --" Tim starts. He stops when Dick shakes him.

"I want," Dick says, more loudly. The heat of anxiety flickers down, going warmer, deeper in his chest. Closer to certainty. "I want to look into your brain and find the pin. And *pull* it."

Tim snorts and Dick rolls them across the room, arm curled around Tim's neck, fingers closed around his hair.

"I want to beat you up. Just -- *beat* you down. Right now."

Tim lifts his left shoulder and slides to the right, so Dick shifts on top, holding Tim down with a knee across his thighs. Tim bites his lower lip. "I'd let you --"

"No," Dick says, louder yet, and they're wrestling again, Tim finally getting into it, fighting back with elbows and knees and flat palms. When Dick's back on top, the living room couch pushed aside and the carpet rucked up askew behind them, he says, "I don't want you *hurt*, get it? I want, I --"

The words stop in his throat and it's easier to move. Roll and wrestle and grapple, Tim sweating and breathing hard beneath him. The hardwood floor of the hall is unforgiving on his bad knee, flat as marble.

All Dick can do is kiss Tim. Wide of the mark, his mouth open and sloppy over Tim's jaw, and then he pulls back.

"I want to kiss you again," Dick says and tries to catch his breath.

"Sex doesn't solve anything, Dick."

"You think I don't know that?" Dick throws himself to the side, hip bouncing against the wall, the impact bringing down a framed picture, and drags Tim with him, half-over him. "I'm not *stupid*."

"Really not," Tim says and wriggles experimentally, testing Dick's hold.

Dick tightens his grip and raises his leg to pin Tim against the wall. "I want to kiss you. I want my brother back, and I want him to *stay*."

"I --"

"*Listen*," Dick hisses. Tim's eyes widen momentarily before he seems to relax. Dick rolls them a full revolution, and again, until he's crouched over Tim, braced on one hand and his good knee, bad leg stretched out behind him and his free hand petting Tim's damp hair. "I want, *Jesus*, I --"

Tim switches his torso back and forth, like he's trying to get comfortable. He works his left hand out of Dick's hold and touches Dick's chin with two fingers. "Just -- just say it."

"I *want*," Dick says, the words far, far more helpless and sincere than any laughter. "I want you back. I want to keep kissing you. I want to kiss you until you're blue in the face. God, Tim, I want..."

Tim's short nails scrape down Dick's throat as he mumbles, "You -- better --"

"I want *you*, not some robot. The little brother I never had, not, not -- not like *this*, and I want you and I want you to stay and I want, I want --"

Tim mumbles again, but the heat in Dick's gut is flaring up again, spreading fast and deep. It's all Dick can do to keep talking without passing out from lack of oxygen.

"I want all your clothes off. And I want the lights on and the goddamn window *open* and I want you, I want --" Dick's mouth trails through the sweat over Tim's forehead; he sucks briefly on a lock of hair. No more explanations or answers fill his mind any longer, just needs and desires that are half-images, partially words, and thoroughly warm. "I want to go down on you and suck you and, and I want --"

When Tim grunts at that, he pulls Tim over him and closes his thighs against Tim's waist. And keeps talking, and talking, hands on Tim's shoulders, mouth against his cheek, his throat, his ear. Certainty has rarely felt so *urgent*.

"I want to fuck you with my *tongue*, and I want to hear you, I want your hands on me and I want to feel you, feel *you*, and make you -- make you *feel* it and I want to swallow everything you've got, I want to turn you over and fuck you --"

Tim shudders in his hold and exhales in a groan. Dick squeezes him harder and talks faster, louder, anything to catch up with what he's feeling.

"I want to fuck you, want to fuck you half out of your *skin*, all the way out, and I want to lick you clean afterwards and hold you. I want my legs over your shoulders, I want to spread open for you -- *Tim* --" Tim's eyes flutter open and they're black in the dark of the hall, shadowed by his hair, as he pants open-mouthed. He grinds down against Dick's groin and the pleasure flares, blinding, burning. "I want you to fuck me, I want your *fist* in me and your prick in me and down my throat and -- I want -- I want --I want to beg for you and strip for you and --"

They're rolling again, together, knocking limbs and foreheads. Dick's mouth just keeps going, breathless and hoarse. He thrusts, erection scraping against the back of his fly, and Tim grunts, matches him, again. They're humping like dogs, rolling, and Dick can't stop talking.

"Want to rip myself in two for you, give you *everything*, want you to --"

All the way down the hall now, humping and grinding, and Dick can hear himself, but the sound is distant, nearly as calm as the beat of the surf, in the midst of how good this feels, how warm and calm he is. His nerves are firing, sparking into words, and Tim is listening. Tim *hears*. And the words aren't wrong or loud or mixed-up. The words are his nerves, bared and ignited, and the nerves are a net and the breeze below; he's falling against Tim, into Tim, with Tim, and he'll never be at rest but he won't be alone, either.

"I want --"

Tim kisses him, biting at both his lips. Opening for him, Dick holds Tim's wrist, the bones shifting in his grasp.

"-- you." The syllable breaks and flares, shouted against the pressure of Tim's tongue. Dick's back on top, one of Tim's legs between his own; he rocks against it, Tim's mouth wet and smiling at him, and drags pleasure through the friction-burn.

"We should --" Tim's face is crazy-quilted with dark flush and bloodless tension.

"Please --" Dick grinds down hard and watches Tim's face flush all the way.

"Just --" Tim breathes and pulls himself on top, grinding, slipping his hand between them. Impatient, his own hands flickering with pins-and-needles, Dick pulls Tim's pants down as soon as the fly's open and goes for his own. He holds Tim around the waist, feels him grind again, feels his hair scrape the side of his face. "Just -- we should --"

His pants have shrunk, or he's grown, and everything's snarled and tangled except for Tim's darkened eyes. Dick kicks off his shoes and pants and pushes against Tim in a chokehold.

"We --" Dick echoes, thrusting against Tim's thigh, again and again, painting him with sticky pre-come.

"I want --" Tim says, pushing himself up until his arms are straight and locked, but his hips move back and forth, his cock dragging over Dick's pubes. "I want --"

Dick thrusts up, hard as he can, ass and most of his torso coming off the floor. He crooks his bad knee against the back of Tim's legs and flips him over.

"I love you, too," Dick says, laughs, *grinds*. Tim's mouth is slick and sweet with more laughter, his body jerking and rubbing against Dick's.

They're going to have to think about getting their shirts off pretty soon. Dick yanks at Tim's arms, grip loose against the sweat, and rolls over. Tim's on top of him, and *heavy*, straddling his thighs and sticking to him.

When Dick wriggles just right -- his shoulders squeaking on the wood, his legs snapping open -- he can thrust into the crease of Tim's thigh and feel Tim's cock dragging against his own.

"Right there --" He's muttering, pushing up even as he pulls down on Tim's arm. His skin has shrunk, the tension's too much, and if they can just *move*, he's going to come and Tim's going to come and it's going to be --. "Right there, Jesus, please --"

Tim twists, chin jabbing to the ceiling, ass dropping hard against Dick, as he pants and grunts. Dick gets his hands on Tim's waist, fighting the tension, pulling him close, until Tim's looking at him again, eyes like saucers as he goes still, as he freezes.

"I --" Tim shakes his head, stillness vanishing in a whirlwind of grinding and bouncing. Dick grasps his ass and drags his other hand forward. He manages to graze Tim's balls and then all he can do is hold on, pushing up, as Tim drops forward, back bowed. "Dick, *damn it*, Dick --"

Tim's hair scours Dick's shoulder; his breath paints bruises on the skin. Dick forces air into his lungs, braces his feet against the floor and thrusts. Tim shudders and comes, wheezing and cursing and repeating Dick's name like it means something, sticky pulses rubbing into them both. He closes his teeth in Dick's skin, still shaking as he collapses, and Dick's half a second from coming -- he needs to come or it's the goddamn end of the world --.

"Let me --" Tim moves upright again, eyes unfocused and skin shining wet as he twists around. Both his hands on Dick, almost too much, make Dick shout and flail. The touch almost hurts, pain sharp as joy, but the curve of Tim's back says *something*. He's white and scarred and pulling more out of Dick than he knew he had.

When he shoots, he sees atomic white, his skull bounces on the floor, he kicks against the wall.

A long time of blankness follows. Dick's body expands, his sensations settle back from roaring twitches and jerks into familiar, quieter rhythms, and there's Tim, lying against his chest, breathing like a marathoner. He's aware of all this, but the blank pervades everything, makes it distant, shrinks it down and softens all the edges.

At some point, painfully, they get up and stumble the rest of the way to the bed. The mattress is almost too soft, the sheets too dry, but then there's sleep. And Tim's breath sounds, feels, far more like wind than pain now.

Then, the mattress shifts and Dick's alone. His eyes are gluey and cruddy, his body loose as kite.

Dusk silvers the room when he finally gets his eyes all the way open. Dick pushes himself up on one arm and shakes the hair from his face.

"Hey," Tim says. He's got the Robin leggings on, but he's bare-chested. There are three hickeys on his chest that match the red of the leggings; Dick grins, then comes back to himself.

This is unbelievable. Even for Tim.

"You're going *out*?" His face gets hot as he knuckles one eye. When he can see clearly, Tim's kneeling on the edge of the bed, reaching for him.

"Just a regular sweep --" Tim's hand brushes Dick's jaw. "Get some sleep. You need it."

"Is that an age-joke?"

Tim's smile tilts, then rights itself, as he stands back up and reaches for his undershirt. "Maybe. What do you think?"

Dick flops onto his back and tightens, then releases, his fists. "I think you're going on patrol like, like --"

"Like it's my job?"

Without looking to check his aim, Dick grabs the nearest pillow and tosses it. "Why can't you take the night off?"

"Because," Tim starts to say, then waits. Dick takes his sweet time turning on his side and looking at Tim. When he does, Tim's smile is softer. Almost apologetic. "Because I don't really feel like telling Batman what's keeping me from patrol. Who is."

He points at Dick, drawing his finger down the length of Dick's body. Dick grabs the sheet and covers himself, as if Bruce could see him right now.

"Wait, Batman?" He can be forgiven for being slightly stupid. He just woke up. He just ejaculated half his *brain*. "What?"

"Batman, yes. A dark figure of the night," Tim says as he retrieves his gauntlets from the dresser. "Some call him a hero, others a vigilante. Still others, a danger to civil liberties."

Dick aims the pillow this time, and gets Tim square in the head. Tim shakes it off.

"But Alfred said he was off-planet."

Tim tugs the left gauntlet and wriggles his fingers. "He got back three days ago."

"Oh." So Bruce's silence remains in place. Then again, Tim isn't speaking to Bruce, either. When he remembers that, Dick sits up straighter, impressed. "You've got *him* under surveillance, too? Damn."

"No." Tim tucks in the jersey and fastens the cape's gorget. When he finally looks at Dick, the little wrinkle between his eyebrows emerges. "What makes you say that?"

"Well, you're not talking to him, so how else..." Dick lets the explanation trail off. Tim's frown has deepened; he's giving Dick his full attention now, not even fussing with the costume. Barefoot, half-dressed, one gauntlet still on the dresser and his hair flattened, Tim blinks a couple times.

"Bruce and I are --. There's a difference of opinion," Tim says. He sits next to Dick; his gauntlet brushes roughly over Dick's arm. Dick can hear him straining for that transparency, fighting to explain, to avoid subtlety. "Batman and Robin, however, are still partners."

"Right, sure." Over the years, Bruce has honed his categories for people and roles to scimitar-sharpness. The old bleedthrough that made things so difficult -- of Dick into Robin, Bruce into Batman, and vice versa -- is a thing of the past. It was history well before Bruce ever gave Jason the suit. "Well. That's good."

Rising, reaching for the mask, Tim pulls on the other gauntlet. "You jealous, big brother?"

The question is a perfect parody of Dick's voice. Dick kicks out and nearly succeeds in tripping Tim. "Dunno. You a jackass, bro?"

Long after the mask's glued in place, Tim's still smiling. This has to be a new record.

At the window, one leg out, Tim twists around. "I'll be back."

"I know." Dick nods, sealing the certainty. "You better."

Tim rests his cheek against the glass. "Batman needs --"

"I got it the first time," Dick says and holds up his hand. "Go."

After Tim leaves, Dick dozes some more before getting up and showering. Confronted by the rigorous order of Tim's fridge and pantry -- all he has are *ingredients*, nothing Dick can just eat -- he orders Japanese delivery.

Now that he has the place to himself, he could explore in-depth. The case, however, is closed. There aren't any more clues to consider, let alone discover. Usually, when a case is finished, there's a brief period of housecleaning. After the notes and evidence have been filed, they're never revisited. Conclusion usually brings calm -- that calm tends to be brief, sure, evaporating as soon as the next crisis shoots down the pike, but however long it does last, it's to be savored.

Now, though, wherever Dick looks, he's confronted by what used to be evidence. So while he feels calm, well-fucked *and* happy to have finished the case, he's also disoriented.

This front room, with its bulbous bay window, was the setting for the blackmail pictures. That weren't blackmail. The *pictures*, that is. Jason was right about the angles; Dick paces off the room, just to be sure. The camera had to have been *in* the room; the three lots across the street are empty, cluttered with rubble and spiky with weeds.

Familiar surroundings transformed into evidence, then returned to their original state: the only other time Dick has felt this kind of disorientation was after Vesper Fairchild's murder. His home became a crime scene then. Tim's apartment isn't quite a crime scene, to be sure, and thankfully. It's something more complicated than that, a site without a crime; there's no blood, but it, too, is doubled.

Over there by the table, Dick solved the case. That spot also saw him drop the pizzas the first night he kissed Tim; in the photos, Pete leaned against the wall, right *there*, with Tim on his knees. Here, by the couch, the photos showed Pete and Tim kissing, while several hours ago, this is where Dick wrestled Tim beneath him and nearly came in his pants.

No place is just one thing; no individual, Dick supposes, is a single person, either. He can recognize the truth of those statements, but it's difficult to hold so many simultaneous perceptions. Something's got to give.

Dick straightens up the room, pushing the couch back into place, smoothing the rug down and running the sweeper over it. He re-hangs pictures that fell during their wrestling match, evens out others that tilted. He works hard, remembering all the chores he used to do under Alfred's watchful eye, fluffing pillows and using his shirt to dust the shelves.

Not surprisingly, Tim is an immaculate housekeeper. Dick can't find anything that actually needs real cleaning; instead, he's simply sharpening the existing order. It was the same with his chores for Alfred. The point was to contribute, whether or not his aid was necessary, in order to learn discipline and caretaking.

In the hall, he moves the broom around and rights more pictures on their hooks. Most are black-and-white photos of Gotham; a few are of the Drakes, Jack and each wife in turn, more of the Young Justice gang. In the center of one arrangement, there's a handbill that Dick hasn't seen in decades. The image suggests a single acrobat caught in stop-motion while tumbling between two trapezes, but it's actually a superimposition of three photos. His mother releases the bar, Dick somersaults at the flight's apogee, and his father catches the second bar with his knees.

Over the years, Bruce bought up as much as he could of Haly's paraphernalia that hit auction houses and private galleries, from posters to entire wooden signs. This handbill, though, looks like it wasn't ever good enough for collectors to consider. The upper-right corner was ripped off, then repaired with cheap tape that has turned a jaundiced orange, while the entire page is sun-weathered; some of the ink ran under the rain.

The picture is crappy and cheap; to call it 'ephemeral', as a collector might, would be kind. Probably Pops Haly had it run off in a local printshop, plastered it all over a town or two on a single trip, then forgot all about it.

Yet Tim has framed it and hung it up like it's a goddamn Monet.

Dick touches the frame, remembering as he does that not all evidence is evidence of wrongdoing. Most of it is memory, most of it will never pass before a detective's eyes. Tim's exhibition of this cheap little poster means more than all those photographs could have.

Exhibitions and exhibitionism, handbills and history, blackmail and confessions: Dick tips the frame straight, puts the broom back in the closet, and heads for bed.

Cases get closed -- murders solved, bad guys brought down -- and from within, posing as a detective, it's easy to forget that it's the *cases* that are artificial. They're stories told backwards to explain the past, to make sense of the irrational things people do, to fix what has irrevocably broken. A detective can't admit that the past is just as messy as the present, just as slippery as the future. Survivors still mourn, victims fight for recovery, and villains often get parole. Much less frequently, they get remorse.

A detective corrects what happened. A man, though, has to keep living.

*

Dick wakes early the next morning when Tim returns from patrol. Waking is a long, involved process; he mumbles and turns over, hears the shower going, dozes, then, finally, opens his eyes when the light in the room changes.

"Morning," Dick says, his sleep-numb hand clumsily connecting with Tim's elbow. "Hey."

There's no response and he shakes himself the rest of the way awake.

Tim's looking at him. Just sitting on the edge of the bed, his hair gone duckling-fluff again, and *looking* at him.

Stretching his arm over his head, Dick bats his lashes and smiles, cocking his head, feeling stupid and silly. He brushes the hair out of his eyes and holds the pose.

"Stop," Tim says. Whispers.

Dick's hand falters in his hair. "Sorry. Just --"

"Just --"

"-- kidding around?" He didn't mean to finish that as a question.

Frowning, Tim brings Dick's hand down to mattress. "There," he says. "Better."

"Sorry." Dick wishes he knew what he was apologizing for.

Tim shakes his head slowly. His hand skims down Dick's side as he sits back on his knees. "Don't be."

"Okay?" Another inadvertent question, and he can't blame the sleepiness.

"You're..." Tim traces Dick's jaw from chin up to under his ear. The touch's delicacy makes him shiver; he feels less like he's being watched, now, more like he's being carved. "Used to compliments from people."

"I guess." Dick shrugs and slides down until he's closer to Tim, cheek against his knee. Maybe he is, but acknowledging that fact would be the height of arrogance.

Tim's index finger skates across Dick's throat -- this time, he can't help giggling -- before it settles on his Adam's apple. "Surface," Tim breathes, almost below a whisper.

Dick shivers and butts his head against Tim's leg. "Yeah. But you *like* my, you know. Surface."

Tim's smile glimmers, fades, then resumes, like those threads of lights cast off a pool's surface. "Among other things."

"I cleaned up," Dick says and rubs his stubbly chin against Tim's thigh.

"I noticed." Tim tries to push Dick away, but Dick bites the anterior tendon and holds on. Tim pats his head like a puppy. "Good boyfriend."

"Huh." Dick rolls away, onto his back, pulling Tim alongside him. "Is that what I am?"

"Um." His body tensing, Tim looks at the ceiling, then over at the clock on the bedside table. "Sorry. I didn't mean --. It just --"

"Slipped out?" Dick pinches Tim's chin and tugs. "Look at me."

Tim's eyes are closed; he breathes through parted lips as the wrinkle over his nose deepens.

"It's okay," Dick says and pinches harder when Tim tries to shake his head. "It *is*." The air in his chest effervesces and bursts through his pores; he swallows against the anxiety. "It's -- what? Something you and Pete used to say?"

Tim's lashes flutter and he frowns. "Yes."

The nasty thing is, after this faked case, this series of red herrings, Dick has no way of knowing whether the phrase *did* just slip out. Tim might have said it deliberately. To what end, Dick can't know.

"Are we going to --" Talk?, Jason's mocking voice cuts through Dick's mind. Intent on ignoring that, Dick holds Tim more tightly. "Talk about it? You and Pete?"

"Nothing to say."

Dick smoothes his thumb over the hollow below Tim's lip. "I don't believe you."

"I *tried*," Tim says and looks away. Away, and down, his eyelashes blurring on his cheeks. "I tried so *hard*."

"Hey," Dick says and touches the back of Tim's hand. Bad move: Tim jerks his hand away. It twists it into his lap like something broken. "Hey, it's okay. You don't -- you shouldn't have to. Try. Just be yourself."

Dick knows how empty, how *lame*, that advice is as soon as Tim looks at him. Still blinking fast, and then -- not blinking. Just looking.

"What do you think I was trying to do?" Tim's mouth stays open after he's finished speaking.

"Tim --" Dick tries, then, even more gently, "Timmy."

Bringing Tim with him, a loose collection of bones and muscle, he lies back against the sleep-warm sheets. His hand moves through Tim's hair, his mouth presses against the hollow of heartbeaten skin at Tim's temple. This is why Tim used his real name with Pete and at the club -- some attempt at honesty, at bypassing their familiar lies and roles, at living out in the open.

"I didn't know how to make you listen," Tim says into Dick's armpit.

Dick understands -- and hopes he's right, hopes like hell -- that Tim means the photos.

"But I always listen." Dick reaches for the quilt and tugs it crookedly over them. "When I'm not talking, anyway."

"But I didn't know --" Tim tips back his head to meet Dick's eye. "What to say."

And *this* is why, after the break-up, Tim faked the blackmail case.

Dick can't know what Tim's thinking; he'll never know, not with absolute certainty, what's deliberate and what's accidental. He just has to trust.

*

Dick is very good at trusting people. Some -- not Tim, though, which makes all the difference -- would say, have said, that he is far too good at it. He's never been given a choice between suspicion and trust -- not until now, that is. And now he's hanging onto trust with everything he's got.

Nothing else in their lives has changed, just the most important part. Tim still goes off every day to high school, though it's been years since he could have aced the GED. They both still patrol at night in masks, usually separately, though Barbara is delighted to forward message-board transcripts concerning Robin's occasional appearances in New York. Dick still teaches at the gym. He graduates one class of tots, handing a sunflower to each of them, and begins tutoring Theo Kaplan in jiu-jitsu. Theo much prefers staying on the ground.

The first time that Tim turns up in New York, he's wearing a blue and black t-shirt and carrying a tray of lasagna that's still warm.

"You're wearing my colors, man." Dick lifts Tim off his feet and spins him around. "I'm so touched!"

Tim's laugh is much more frequent these days, hoarse and shocked as it always was. He yanks Dick's shirt up his back and slaps him. "This is a Blue Beetle shirt."

Dick lets him drop and digs into the food. "Am I going to have to go to *Texas*? Have a talk with Señor Reyes?"

Tim kicks his knapsack halfway across the loft's floor. "The old one, dumbass."

"Good," Dick says around a mouthful. The fact of Tim, *here*, unpacking his bag and tuning in the radio, hits him like a shot of Bruce's good whiskey. "You brought this grub on the *train*?"

Everyone in this life moves around the world like it's their suburban backyard. Fliers like Clark, of course, but everyone else, too, whether it's the 'Quod or a WayneTech jet. Tim's visit, however, strikes Dick as absurdly touching nonetheless.

Tim shakes a keyring at him. "I've been driving since I was fourteen, remember?"

"And yet, and yet --" Dick wraps his arms around Tim's waist and lifts him up again, burying his face in Tim's hair. "You're visiting *me*."

Reaching back, Tim hooks his arm around Dick's neck and wiggles around until they're face to face. His lips are slightly chapped, ticklish against Dick's. "You're surprised?"

Dick has to trust this, too. Go with his instincts, relax into honesty. "In a good way, don't get me wrong."

Dick never let himself think this far ahead. This, with Tim, is so far ahead, around countless curves, across a stormy sea and well past here be dragons, that there isn't any way he could have imagined this. But if he *had*, he suspects he would have expected that Tim would move back into the manor. It would have been symmetrical, somehow. Symmetrical with *what*, he doesn't know.

He tries to explain this to Tim, but only gets Quiet Regarding Look #581, the one that says I'm very fond of you, but your ways are alien to me.

"You know --" Dick lifts his hands and draws two lines in the air. "Symmetrical."

Tim's expression smoothes and shifts until he looks like he's about to laugh. "Are you worried about me?" He tosses the remote control from hand to hand. "A guy could get up to no good, all alone in the big city..."

"You probably should have a curfew," Dick replies. He rubs his jaw. "And a nanny. Once you move the Titans back to New York, we can renegotiate."

Tim brandishes the remote at Dick's chest. "You know that's not happening."

"It'd be so much better!" Dick hops backward to crouch on the arm of the sofa. "*Convenient*, for one thing, and I could --"

"You want to join the team again, don't you?" Tim's tone is even and Dick can't tell if he's joking.

"No." Dick hugs one knee to his chest and rocks on his perch. "I could pitch in, though. If you needed me."

Tim nods slowly, a gradual smile spreading. "I'll be sure to give you a call, then."

*

The Outsiders survive, barely, a brush with Grodd; Nicky Lanzo gets indicted on fourteen felony counts; the Titans take down a cybernetic parasite that had burrowed into Buddy Baker's jacket and metamorphosed across the western states. Life, in other words, goes on, and Dick's comfortable with the cliché.

Throughout all the strange and ordinary events that make up this life, Dick can't seem to keep his hands to himself. He wasn't *wrong* when he'd told himself that he wanted more than sex with Tim, but he wasn't exactly right, either. It's complicated. He wants to be with Tim, period. Just, whenever he is with Tim, he gets -- hands-y.

He worries, sometimes, that he's not doing enough.

"I'm unclear about what you're expecting here," Tim says. It would be easy for Dick to hear a chill in his tone, worry that he's about to get shut out again, but since Tim is naked save for his briefs, lying on his stomach across the bed, Dick can forego the worry.

Instead, he grins and shrugs. "I just feel like --"

"Unromantic," Tim says, repeating Dick's attempt at explanation. His shoulderblades shift under his skin, cast brief shadows, then his medial glutes emerge as he draws one leg up. His ass stands out in greater relief now; he sighs, rolling onto his side, when Dick fits his palm over the curve of one buttock.

"Yeah, unromantic." Dick pinches the taut skin. "That's the best word."

"I don't think it *is* a word."

Dick pinches him harder. "It is now."

"Okay, say it is --" Tim's neck stretches as he pushes back against Dick's hand. "Even so, what *would* be? Romantic?"

Dick snaps the waistband on Tim's briefs. "I don't know. Flowers?"

Snickering, Tim rolls onto his back and traps Dick's arm there. "*Really*?"

"Maybe not?" Dick wiggles his hand and manages to brush his fingers just underneath Tim's balls. Tim covers the gasp, but just barely. "All I'm saying -- not for nothing -- is --"

He loses that thought, and the rest of them follow quickly, as Tim scissors his legs around Dick's waist and pulls himself up. Until they're face to face, Dick's hand cupping Tim's balls, the kiss is jagged, arrhythmic, as Tim's fingers on Dick's nipples are.

"You were saying?" Tim asks when he's got his hand on Dick's cock and his mouth on one nipple.

"Nuh--" Dick coughs. He squeezes Tim until his eyes widen. "Never mind."

Hands, he's all hands, and it's not like this is the first time he's been thinking with his hands. Maybe this is just what he *does*.

Maybe this oddball life, chockfull of space bugs and talking gorillas, mad scientists and nefarious criminals, simply isn't suited to romance. Maybe it's them; maybe their mission makes them immune to what's romantic. Dick isn't the best judge of such things. What he *does* know is that, however absurd the mission can be, however catch-as-catch-can the time he spends with Tim is, it all works for them.

He did make romance work, on occasion, with Barbara and Kory. He wouldn't have dared try with Roy or Helena, no matter how much he sometimes wanted to. He'd like to take Tim out to dinner, go to some clubs or the movies, buy him presents. Not flowers, though, he got *that* message loud and clear. He'd like to -- make a gesture, or seven.

Whenever he says so, Tim smirks at him.

"Do what you have to do," Tim says at one point. The smirk carves his face as he looks up from the computer. "But I'm good."

"Are you?" Dick wants to *demand* an answer. Obtain a full accounting, double-columned and audited, of Tim's thoughts and emotional states. He knows he can't do that, but it doesn't stop him from wanting. "You'd say so if -- if you weren't?"

Tim spins his deskchair around. "I am, and I would."

Pointing at him, Dick attempts to assume the full Bat-glare and Voice of the Night. "With *words*, this time. No more gauntlets? No more Grayson-hamsters running your crazy mazes?"

Tim winces, then nods. Gradually, he smiles. "With words. Promise to try."

"Good," Dick says in his own voice. "I'm getting too old for this nonsense."

Tim's smile swerves back into a smirk before Dick grabs him into a headlock.

*

"Aww, baby, baby, why you gotta play hard to get?" Arm around Dick's neck, Jason bites his ear.

"But I chased *you*," Dick says and tests the hold.

He chased Jason for twenty-six blocks, across rooftops and down sewer service tunnels, around water towers and under steel awnings. When Jason stopped here, just outside the main greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens, Dick slowed and circled wide. It was too easy, too anti-climactic, to believe that Jason would simply give up.

Dick was right. When he closed the distance between them, Jason flipped forward, kicking his right leg out in an acute sweep. His steel-lined boot caught Dick's bad knee and brought him down.

"Did you now?" Patting Dick down, Jason helps himself to the escrimas and the taser-pen and zip-strips in his belt, then shoves Dick away. "Whatever could be so important that you'd come find little ol' me?"

Dick ignores the wrenching spasm in his knee and jumps to his feet. "We should talk. We need to --. Talk."

Jason's knife catches the light, flashing as he draws it across the air, roughly in line with Dick's throat. "What'd I say about that?"

"Come on --"

"You can't be *this* stupid." Jason strops the blade against his gloved palm. "Don't think that's possible."

"I'm not."

The red mask contorts into a ghoulish smirk. "And yet you really think we're gonna -- *what*? Brew up some herbal tea, put Carole King on the hi-fi and fucking *process* like a couple of bed-death dykes?"

Dick pushes the hair out of his eyes; it would be so *easy*, and satisfying, to knock that knife from Jason's hand and grab him. Beat him until he just shut up. Easy, but that's not what he's here for. "Thank you. I wanted to say thank you. You really helped with the case."

The knife disappears into Jason's belt; he shrugs, hands deep in his pants' pockets. "You need all the help you can get."

"Maybe I do --" Dick steps forward, moving as carefully and slowly as if Jason's a wounded deer, thrown from the highway. Jason twists away and kicks at the hedge before vaulting up onto a low-hanging branch.

Something moans inside the hedge. Laughing, swinging like a monkey from the next branch, Jason sends a shower of leaves and twigs over Dick as Dick crouches on the ground.

"Consider it an engagement present for you and Flamebird," Jason calls, releasing the branch and landing on the greenhouse. The thunk of his boots on glass nearly drowns out the low, insistent moan. Dick pushes his hand into the thick brambles, moving it around by the pin-light he grips in his teeth. At last, he grazes an ankle, bound with rough rope.

By the ankle, he pulls out a man, trussed-up like a pig, face swollen nearly beyond recognition, twigs and burrs catching at every surface. When he sees Dick, he slurs through broken teeth, "Not another one of you."

Juris the Jackal, worked over and then some by Jason, gets returned to MCU custody, then immediately sent to the ER.

Juris had been running a mid-level extortion and drug ring among the punk and gay kids in the East End. Two of his customers died after taking his ersatz E; three more who didn't pay up were beaten into comas.

"And that's what brought you to that club?" Dick peels off his leggings and tosses them onto the pile atop Tim's jersey and cape.

Tim scratches his jaw. He beat Dick back to the apartment by a good half hour, so he's curled up on the couch with his English textbook in his lap. "Not really. At first, I was just..."

Dick scrubs the sting of solvent off his cheeks. "Looking for love in all the wrong place?"

"Sort of." Tim sets his book aside and stretches his arms over his head. When he's finished, he looks up at Dick, his eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion and glowing bruise-blue in the low light. "Looking for Pete, actually."

Some day, Dick will get the hang of this. He's not jealous, he's fairly sure of that. But he keeps getting caught off-guard by any mention of Tim's attempt at a normal life. At a *boyfriend* and clubgoing, and everything else they did.

"Anyway," Tim says as he stretches again. "Bed?"

Now, *this*, this Dick can get used to. He swats Tim as he passes, then hipchecks him aside and races him down the hall. Beats him to bed and claims the best pillow for himself.

*

The next day, Dick is back in New York, upending his bag into the laundry basket, downing a bowl of cereal, and changing into his work clothes. When his phone rings, he looks around, can't find it, and has to close his eyes and follow the ringtone.

Somehow, it slipped under the front table and made a little nest for itself on top of the junk mail. Dick grabs for it and jabs the on-button before it can switch to voice-mail; Tim's already in third period Latin class, but there's no point in chancing it. "Yello?"

"Dick," Bruce says.

*Bruce*. He sounds -- like himself, deep baritone and ritzy clipped vowels, half-amused at something that mere mortals can't perceive.

Dick lands on the couch. "Hi. Hey. How was your trip?"

Bruce huffs a shallow breath, ignoring the question. "Tim isn't taking my calls. Nor is he returning my messages."

"Ri-ight, I heard." Dick switches the phone to his other ear and shakes out the pins-and-needles from his hands. "Didn't you see him last night?"

Bruce doesn't reply for several moments. "I can hardly remember last night -- Mitzi was simply...or is she Missy? At any rate, she poured so much champagne down my throat, I'm lucky I remembered Alfie's name."

"Uh-huh." Dick's pulse jumps in his temple, shaking up a faint headache. "So I guess you're not alone right now, huh?"

Bruce chuckles. "I couldn't bring Misty to *work*, Dick! What would Lucius say?"

Swallowing a protest against the lie, Dick bounces his head against the couch cushions. "My mistake, sorry. What's up?"

He hates being lied to. He's used to it, but that doesn't mean he's ever particularly enjoyed it. Especially not when the lies are ritualized like this, repeated for no reason other than to lie and get away with it.

"Well --" Bruce drawls the word into four syllables. "Tim's frozen me out, I couldn't possibly say *why*. We'd been having such fun together!"

"Sorry," Dick says; his teeth click against the apology. "To hear that, I mean."

"So you see," Bruce continues, smooth and assured, as if Dick hadn't spoken. "I hoped you might use your...*influence* and considerable charm to change his mind."

His skin prickles all over at the stress Bruce lays on influence, and then again at the Gotham-WASP prolonged vowel in charm.

"I don't know," Dick says. His throat tightens; his eyes throb in their sockets. "What'd you have in mind?"

"Join me for dinner?" Bruce's voice is slightly plaintive now.

Dick leans over his lap and presses his thumbs against his eyes. "The White Hart, or L'Arc, or Cadenza, or...?"

"Home," Bruce says. "I'd like us all at home."

His equilibrium tilts, slides inside his head and beneath his feet, his headache brightening sharply. Dick grasps for the sofa's arm.

When he opens his eyes, he sees one of Tim's sneakers by the TV, wedged under the stand. Red checked canvas, its heel has been crushed down and its sole fixed with electrical tape. A Nightwing-symbol was drawn in black marker over an older anarchist-A-in-a-circle.

The shoe could be any Gotham kid's. But it belongs to *Tim*, left behind here because its owner will be back, and Dick smiles through the headache.

"Dick?"

"I'll need to talk to Tim." Reclining, Dick swings his feet up onto the coffee table; a pile of Tim's newspapers slide to the floor. "I'll let you know what we decide."

[end]

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Fugazi, "[Forensic Scene](http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/fugazi/forensicscene.html)". Samantha, G., Kate &amp; Jube all held my hand, read scene-drafts, and egged me on throughout the summer. G. brainstormed plot and lyrics with me, pondered birdboy mysteries, and sharpened Jason brilliantly. Jube &amp; Kate shared their dear Pete; they also indefatigably talked music, tinhats, and craft, and never failed to challenge me. _And_ they beta'ed this. I have the best friends in the world; I love them all and can't thank them enough.


End file.
